[extropy-chat] Organ printing

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> Adrian Tymes wrote:
> > .. 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.
> 
> Perhaps you could elaborate on how this device could do that using
> an *actual* organ, any biological organ of interest to humans would
> do fine. 

I could, but others have done so quite eloquently.  Google on "kidney
scaffold" to find some of the writeups.  That's about what I was
thinking of: same technique, finer control.

> >  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.)
> 
> The "possibility" or the wild-eyed dreams are free and words are 
> cheap speculation? Can you put a probability however small (0.1%
> as opposed to 10% etc in the next X years) on this and explain 
> your reasoning, or is this pure flight of fancy and speculation quite
> without anything to do with reasoning at all on your part? 

The possibility, and neither.  It's far enough in the future that to
put a probability on it now would be meaningless - this is most
certainly not something that's right around the corner - but on the
other hand, such a thing is consistent with our current understanding
of how neurons work, and there has been significant work done on it.
Google on "brain prosthetic" to see some of those examples.  (Very
early stage - we're talking artificial retinas, robotics controlled
directly from the brain, and so forth, as well as mapping of the
brain's functions by region.)

> You might think I'm pick on you. Well you composed the subject
> header "Organ Printing", you advertised and I came to see, besides
> you are pretty smart, you just might be able to do something with
> a good question besides wet yourself.

I don't think you're picking on me, although I do think you could have
phrased those questions a lot less offensively.  I also think it would
have been better all around if you had tried a few search queries
yourself before assuming I was dreaming.  There's a reason they call it
http://stopbeingsuchalazyfuck.com/