I recently ran into a computer programmer who was tinkering with what looked like a stripped down printer with a whitish blob that looked like hardened you-know-what. Curious, I asked him what he was up to. He was printing what would be or could be biological tissue. Here's a suboptimal explanation of what I saw.
On one side of this bio hackerspace was an area to cultivate cells. The interesting thing about cells is you just need one. If it's a bacterium like E. Coli there's so much love going around that they multiply rapidly...1 becomes 2 becomes 4 becomes 8 becomes 16, 32, 64, 128, 248...you get the idea. f(x) = 1 + 2x + 4x^2 + 8x^3....something...who cares, just fit any exponential equation you jive with but know that you can culture blobs of love. They are usually found in our gut and smell like poop (don't try). I also saw white-pink stem cells on a carrot that looked like the unshaven face of a friend I won't name.
Back to the printer. What I saw was a combination of an undressed laser-jet printer with a cartridge full of cells, an Arduino micro-controller, a CD-disk drive with a slider and a petri dish to catch the droppings. The micro-controller was programmed to control the print head and spit out cells on an array. That's basically a printer printing cells according to design. See it in action.
These are very early days. So let's fast forward this a bit and imagine what could be printed. If you print layer upon layer, you could be building a 3-D organic structure. That structure could be skin or even a part of a much ethanol-laced liver. That's what Organovo does and I learnt that Autodesk is developing CAD tools to help us print body parts. Now the good news is unlike ink you don't need to waste much cell to print. Print a bit and allow the rest to multiply. Wonder what Mrs. Bobbit would do now. Ahem.
