Printed Human Parts

All over the blogo-techno-inter-tubes there has been a buzz about ink-jet printed body parts. Here it is reported by John Hunter, and here it is at treehugger (with ridiculous 3D model). The funny thing about these two articles is that they are not the same thing; the first refers to a Pittsburgh team trying to use muscle stem cells to potentially produce bone and muscle, and the second article discusses Organovo, a startup attempting to do the same thing with internal organs.

But both articles loudly tout the possibilities of inkjet printing human organs while very subtly mentioning that no one has done it yet. Frankly, its still 99% idea and 1% science. And XKCD's Law of Research Translation comes into play here, as I highly doubt we see ink-jet printers making body parts in the next 50 years.

But I have two thoughts here. First, what if they could do it? Wouldn't it make sense to start with something easy, like cancellous bone, before graduating to harder architecture, like striated cardiac muscle? And although I understand that laying cells down might be relatively easy (compared to inventing a time machine) I do not understand how they expect to make nerve connections and the endocrinic connections that cells use to communicate amongst themselves locally.

Second: why not use this to build human-machine interfaces? What if you could print, layer by layer, nerves that would connect to a micro-USB hub? You could then implant that printed bioport into a living being, and potentially connect them to USB! Or print a nerve system that matched the arm, and then attach that to the shoulder of wounded soldiers for connection to a bionic arm they have manufactured? Printed biological materials, it seems to me, is a lot less feasible for whole-organ printing than for human-machine interface device printing.


_