[extropy-chat] Organ printing

[Adrian Tymes]

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051114/organprinter_tec.html

"Nurse, fax this heart to St. John's."

...okay, not quite, but it's an interesting take on 3D printing
nonetheless.  In theory, if one could coax a person's stem cells into
the appropriate types of cells (which hopefully is mostly a matter of
finding the right series of chemical, electrical, and possibly thermal
cues), this device could then be used to pattern them into organs for
reimplantation.  An extreme end would be to print an entire new body
for someone (say, a cryo patient) - although the brain would have to be
transplanted and hooked up (and for cryo patients, working stem cells
would have to be thawed out and restarted, then likewise for the brain
after transplant), so this wouldn't help with problems inside the
brain.  (Of course, there's the possibility of emulating the brain in
silico, then hooking that up to a reprinted body every several
decades.)