Dude, print me up a new liver

Check this out... bio printers:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article...,RSS,RSS,00.asp

How long before we start getting spam offering to print you new, huge reproductive organ(s) of your choice?

cool i give it 2 monte before we get the emails

what happens if you start to run out of ink but you cant really tell. youll be putting tissue inside you that really isnt all their. personally , i dont trust it

They'll probably do their best to get all the bugs worked out of it before actually using it in humans. Even without using it in humans, think of the things they could find out just researching the effects of drugs on printed-out organs!

thats pretty cool but where do they get the cells from for the ink? I wouldn't trust printed out tissue.

well you cant run to bestbuy and get a refill cartridge, you would have to get it at the local hospital for thousands of dollers

Printing organs would be very hard since the printer would have to put all the cells in the right order and there are billions of cells in an organ. But they can use this in a different way, i believe the disease is called muscular distosrrophy(which basicaly erodes your muscle). The thing is that muscle cells are all the same and anybody that works out knows that if you tear a muscle it grows back stronger. So they can make muscle tissue piece by piece and put it in the person and in a few weeks the individual muscle tissues would join to for a one muscle.

that sounds good and all but by the time the muscle has completely formed together the desease will have destroyed it

Um...yes and no. Muscular dystrophy does not usually have a straightforward, linear progression...it does its damage in fits and starts. And in some people it doesn't progress at all. So new muscle tissue could very well have time to strengthen and join with the rest of the muscular tissue, and give real quality of life to MS patients...even for an extended period.

i have 2 words: redneck science

No, they'd be trying to print out beers and pick-up truck parts then.

They might put some sort of sensor in the cartridge so it would alert them when the contents got below a certain level.

I'm just wondering what they do about preservation of the cells and contamination precautions. If they keep the cartridges refrigerated, then it might take some time for the flow to get going, so it might be a bit patchy to start with and then all the equipment would have to be cleaned down thoroughly at the end to remove all traces of the cell solution before moving on to the next type. It might be quite an interesting result if they miss some though.

If they get the bugs (of all sorts) ironed out, I think it's a good idea because it would make it so easy to produce near enough identical samples in large enough sizes, even distribution and sufficient quantity.

I think this would be one of those instances where the cartridges would be loaded just before they started the procedure. I also think it would be a procedure perform outside the body, with the constructed organ implanted after "printing"