But what happens when the toner runs low? :-)
A "printer" that can generate a "copy" of human organs!
http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...medium=twitter
Tissue Engineer Prints Replacement Kidney Onstage at TED 2011 Anthony Atala wows the crowd
By Rebecca Boyle
Tissue Printer via TED MED
One of PopSci’s favorite regenerative medicine specialists, Anthony Atala, printed a real kidney on stage at the 2011 TED conference Thursday, in a technique that could be used to create new organs from a patient’s own tissue rather than relying on donated organs.
“It’s like baking a cake,” Atala said.
A few years ago, Atala figured out how to produce human tissue with a desktop inkjet printer, using cells as the printer ink. In a TED talk last year, he described printing heart valves and other tissues. This week at TED, he brought one of his patients on stage. When he was 10, Luke Massella was among the first people to receive a printed kidney — now he’s a healthy college student.
process employs scanners that collect a 3-D image of the organ that needs to be replaced. A small tissue sample, which AFP describes as the size of a postage stamp, seeds the printer, which replicates the tissue layer by layer to build a new organ, all in about six hours. It uses the patient’s own tissue, so it avoids any organ rejection issues.
To illustrate its simplicity, Atala whipped one up onstage and held it in his hand, according to several understandably breathless media reports.
Scanners and printers could conceivably be used to treat wounds. A flatbed scanner could scan a patient’s wound, while a printer adds the right types of tissues to fill it back in. “You can print right on the patient,” Atala said, according to a report on the talk at Fast Company.
Atala said about 90 percent of people on organ transplant lists are waiting for kidneys, but donors are few and far between. Meanwhile, patients must undergo painful and complicated dialysis treatment. And mechanical replacements are still a few years away. Atala said regenerative medicine could solve the organ shortage crisis, replacing failing body parts on demand.
