An Arm, A Finger And A Couple Of Ears Please

Here is an idea to consider. According to Zacks.com, 3D printing is taking off at the moment, having "only just brushed the surface of its potential applications, and looks set to take off in a big way in the near future". Today and into the future we wont just be able to 3D print a scale model of you house, but something much more important and life changing. Organs, limbs and skin.

Despite advances in modern medicine people are still dying every day from diseases of their organs, or from infections of things like massive burns. These are vital and at the moment, hard to replace parts of the machine that is the human body. Take a moment then to consider the possibility that if you had a terminal disease of something like the heart that you could just order up a new one to be surgically installed. This is the reality that 3D printers, or more specifically, 3D bio-printers offer. Using live cells, new body parts and organic components will be built up, layer by layer, into an exact copy of the piece its replacing.

A piece of experimental breast tissue implant for those who have had a mastectomy being developed by QUT - Image taken from abc.net.au

The quality of life for many people with chronic illnesses or pains of joints would be drastically increased. We could print off new cartilage for those who really need it, like retiring sportspeople and the elderly. Do you have early onset liver cancer? No problem. We can just take it out before the cancer can spread and put in a new one. Finger chopped of in a workplace accident? Just copy and paste the other remaining finger and you're good as new. Waiting lists could become a thing of the past.

Now I do realise that I'm massively over simplifying the complexity of turning some cells into a fully functioning organ or piece of tissue. But for the sake of those who don't have a strong biological background or aren't that interested I have done this deliberately. The point however remains the same. Sometime in the near future it may be possible to be admitted to hospital and have life threatening diseases removed from your body by removing the diseased body part. How this will work for something like the brain is still uncertain but for those who don't need a brain replacement (although I can think of a few who do), the fairly near future looks very bright.

Thanks for reading and if you have any thoughts or comments, please post below. I'd be very interested to see what you think of this technology.