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khaosworksInk-jet printing creates tubes of living tissue
Three-dimensional tubes of living tissue have been printed using modified desktop printers filled with suspensions of cells instead of ink. The work is a first step towards printing complex tissues or even entire organs."Dude! Run me off a couple of kidneys for Mrs McNulty here!"
"This could have the same kind of impact that Gutenberg's press did," claims tissue engineer Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina.
Many labs can now print arrays of DNA, proteins or even cells. But for tissue engineers, the big challenge is creating three-dimensional structures. Mironov became interested when Thomas Boland of Clemson University, also in South Carolina, told Mironov how he could print biomaterials using modified ink-jet printers.
The printers are adapted by washing out the ink cartridges and refilling them with suspensions of, say, cells. The software that controls the viscosity, electrical resistances and temperature of the printing fluids is reprogrammed and the feed systems altered.
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no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 05:17 am (UTC)A.
thinking that's just so cool!
(I should say something more intelligent, what with my degree in Biology and all. Anyway.)
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 06:59 am (UTC)If human tissue can be extruded this way - from a cell line ten or twenty generations removed from the original, scooped-out-of-a-human cells - is it still cannibalism? I mean, the original cells were human, and the tissue would (presumably) work if it were implanted into a human being - but it came out of a printer, for God's sake. If someone at the lab put a slab of the stuff in your bologna sandwich or moo shu pork as a perverted joke, would you be a cannibal or just
a fratboysomeone who ate something really disgusting?no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 07:06 am (UTC)Cannibalism \Can"ni*bal*ism\, n. [Cf. F. cannibalisme.]
The act or practice of eating human flesh by mankind. Hence;
Murderous cruelty; barbarity. --Berke.
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From WordNet (r) 1.7:
cannibalism
n : the practice of eating the flesh of your own kind
So, yeah. Coming from a printer or a sentient being, it's still human flesh, and flesh of your own kind, so if you eat it, it's cannibalism.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 07:15 am (UTC)If you donated the original cells yourself, is it cannibalism or simply the equivalent of chewing off a dried bit of your lip?
(Look, the bioethicists only ask the questions that the normal people would think of. The real problems lie out in the territory where only the whackjobs live, and by the time the question gets forced upon the public, you've got Raelians and it's too late to do anything about it. Unless something like this comes up.)
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 07:26 am (UTC)Ultimately, cannibalism is a social taboo because of a couple of things: it isn't conducive to population growth if people start slaughtering each other like animals for food, and for health reasons - the entire problem with CJD, kuru, and all that. Now, if those problems were eliminated, the first due to mass production of human tissue and the second thanks to genetic manipulation, then the basis for the social taboo wouldn't apply. Now, that doesn't mean it isn't cannibalism by definition, it just means that there's no good reason to protest except on cultural grounds.
(F'rex, I oppose human cloning because they've yet to show satisfactorily that they've solved the problem of genetic defects and rapid aging. If that were solved, then my only objection would be to specific purposes of cloning - such as a slave race, or organ replacement reasons. Apart from that, there would be no good reason to oppose cloning except on cultural grounds - and maybe genetic diversity grounds or overpopulation grounds)
So if the reasons for the social taboo no longer apply, and the cultural icky factor can be overcome then cannibalism simply wouldn't be taboo anymore. Then you can have "Long Pig" establishments like in the comic Transmetropolitan, or bastard farms (growing anaencephalic clones for organ donation or consumption purposes) - Today's Special: French People.
no subject
Date: 2003-01-23 08:12 am (UTC)"I said I needed two. Not twenty."
"Sorry, man."
"What am I supposed to do with twenty corneas?"