3-d Bio Printing: Do You Toss the Kidney When You Run Out of Toner?

Yes, a commerically-available living tissue printer is now making human tissue and organs. If you aren't familiar, manufacturing from nano to macro levels is being revolutionized by overgrown ink-jet printers that can make things in almost any material and increasingly at new scales. The technology is exciting. The loss of human craft knowledge is looming and tragic. Extending this to full scale biological manufacturing, which would appear to be the direction is frankly, great, astonishing and terrifying all at once. From the article:

But additive manufacturing is on the verge of breaking into a more startling area. Using the techniques of 3D printing, doctors may soon be able to produce soft-tissue implants such as blood vessels. And following on from that could be the ability to build a whole organ - such as a liver or kidney - complete with all its blood vessels. Additive manufacturing could make the transplant list a thing of the past.


The first ’3D bio-printer’ for making human tissue and organs became available at the end of last year. Produced for a San Diego biotechnology company, Organovo, by Australian automation specialist Invetech, the machine is being evaluated by research institutions studying regenerative medicine - the technique of growing organs using cultures of a patient’s own cells.

If this works, it seems likely that eventually we will see meat made this way, replacement legs, fresh brains, and your dead kitten reanimated. I suppose if we hit the scale button, we could make micro zoos, where we would have enough room for tiny animals, ready to blow them up again if we ever figure out how to regenerate missing ecosystems.