eli5: What does 3D print human body parts mean? How can a 3d printer do that?
In: Technology
A 3D printer deposits tiny bits of material in an interesting pattern. If the material were human cells, the printer could arrange them into an organ.
This is all highly theoretical, but experiments are ongoing. Cells are small, but we have other machines that manipulate them. Cells take some work to make stick to each other, it’s a lot more complex than the molten plastic used to 3D print a toy, but that might be possible since we use glues to seal surgical cuts.
Of course it would have to be sterile and genetically matched, so there will be many years before any of this sort of thing is approved for important organs.
For quite a long time we’ve been able to grow human cells in a test tube. For example, we can create new cells for a heart.
But making these cells form the structure of a heart, so that it can actually work, isn’t directly possible. We need some kind of structure to guide the growth of the cells. A 3D printer is a tool that can potentially build these structures, and be used to guide the growth of cells that can form new organs.
This is an emerging application of 3D printing, and is hopefully something we’ll hear a lot more about in the future.
Think about minecraft. The player places a block. That block is 0.01% of the structure. The more blocks you have for an item, the more definition it has. 3D printers place a “block” of material and continues to build it until the body part is done. Again, the more material (block) it has, the more defined it is.
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