We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.
Cell-based and regenerative medicine can restore human functions lost to disease, including returning some sight to the blind.
Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase 'organ failure' will disappear.
The moment of the print button for biology is nearing. Effectively, this could also mean that in a not-too-distant future, smart pharmacology will permit us to receive a continuous supply of antidepressants or neuroenhancers every time our dopamine level drops.
Building a solid organ like the liver in the lab is different and harder than with an organ like the bladder because solid organs are very vascular.
I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.
Not too many people in cocktail parties are aware of Bioprinting and growing organs, or the coming technological singularity; I've seen very little philosophical speculation about how far we can go, how much we could achieve.
[Our lab uses] a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells.
I think people who have all kinds of debilitating mobility issues will benefit from robotic augmentation. That is, even before we get into organ replacement and organ printing and synthetic biology and so on and so forth.
Genetic scientists say that one day it will be possible to grow new body parts, like new breasts and new hands. It's going to be a huge moneymaker, because you know that as soon as women grow another breast, men will want another hand.
Now, radical forward thinking is offering hope for the future: Replacement body parts to order. A team of scientists in California believe that if you can design them on a computer, you should be able to print them out.
In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.
In fact when you combine stem cell technology with the technology known as tissue engineering you can actually grow up entire organs, so as you suggest that sometime in the future you get in an auto accident and lose your kidney, we'd simply take a few skin cells and grow you up a new kidney. In fact this has already been done.
