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In-Depth Information
In the inal step in the process, the titanium jawbone was printed by a
Belgian company called LayerWise that specializes in high-end, medical-grade
3D printing technology. The smooth, gleaming new titanium jaw was printed
by shining a laser into titanium powder, fusing 3,000 meticulously laid layers.
Finally, the printed bone was coated with ceramic. Hours after the surgery,
the woman spoke and sipped soup.
Tissue engineering
The term
bionic
apparently was derived by combing the Greek word
bios
, or
living, with the word fragment
onic
, from electronic. The word
bionic
was made
famous by a popular 1970s TV show that featured Steve Austin, the Bionic Man.
Steve's signiicant other, the Bionic Woman, had her own successful spinoff
and periodically made guest appearances on the Bionic Man.
The Bionic Man and Woman had superhuman strength and laser-keen
senses thanks to the insertion of several very expensive artiicial body parts. In
nations that broadcast these shows, backyards and playgrounds would empty
out at regular intervals as kids disappeared to watch TV. I remember packs of
my friends and I running in extreme slow motion, making electronic clicking
sounds while we performed bold physical stunts or made daring escapes from
behind one another's enemy lines.
Bionic parts sounded promising several decades ago. In the future, the
notion of bionic body parts will seem crude—prone to malfunction, poor it,
and unable to evolve—similar to the limitations of today's artiicial replace-
ment hips and knees. In the future, bionic parts will be replaced by custom-
designed 3D printed tissue.
If plastic is the favored raw printing material in industry, stem cells will
be the favored raw material of bioprinting. The more regenerative medicine
advances, the more it comes back to nature. The future of tissue engineering
lies in 3D printing stem cells into precise conigurations and letting them do
the work growing the living tissue.
Stem cells are the raw clay of the human body and are much more skillful at
making body parts than we are. Stems cells are unspecialized, meaning they
have not yet committed to a particular career path in terms of which sort of
bodily cell they will grow into. Since stem cells can be pushed to differentiate
into any one of the approximately 210 cell types found in the human body,
stem cells are pure gold, medically speaking.
