The holy grail of human kind, that is “live forever”, may not as far as you think. Dr. Anthony Atala’s lab at Wake Forest University has been able to grow human body parts from cells outside of human body. And what remarkably awesome of his research is, those body parts are molded using some kind of a specialized 3-D ink-jet printer! Welcome to the future, my friends..
This is the excerpt from Time magazine:
And that’s when the fun starts. In order to mold human organs from a clump of cells, Atala came up with creatively constructed scaffolds that would guide the newly grown cells into shape. In most cases — for the bladder, blood vessels and valves, for example — he uses a biodegradable material made of collagen, the structural component in skin. But in order to create more complex structures, such as the heart, he needed something far more sophisticated as a matrix. That’s where the inkjet printer came in. One of Atala’s colleagues had the bright idea that if a printer can spray tiny bits of ink in a pre-set pattern, why couldn’t that same technique be used to scatter cells into pre-designed templates? So, instead of printing in one dimension, Atala’s expert re-tooled the printer to “print” its cells in successive layers; the end result is a three-dimensional mold of cells that looks suspiciously like, for example, a rudimentary heart.
Of course it still take years and years and years before a human heart, for example, can be built perfectly and can be used to replace a defective human heart. And we’re not talking about hearts only, this technology applied to any kind of human body parts. Think about arms and legs and nose and eyes, everything! After that achievement from Dr. Anthony, my imagination (and yours) can soar to the unlimited sky. Imagine combine Dr. Gregory’s with those cloning technology. Maybe soon we will see someone with four arms, or super huge and strong body, or twelve finger (for some hardcore hackers to type faster on computer keyboards), or eagle-sight eyes, or anything you can (and cannot) imagine. Quite scary (but exciting), isn’t it? 