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hard-working, self-directed employees that just need the right kind of work
environment. “Think of a stem cell as a worker bee,” explained Jonathan. “If
you can ind a way to print certain types of stem cells into exactly the right
location on the engineered tissue, it's like having a stem cell walk into an
empty ofice and start to look for work to do.”
As researchers like Jonathan continue to unwrap the mysteries of 3D printed
living tissue, hopefully the risks of organ transplants will someday diminish.
The beauty of 3D printing stem cells harvested from a patient's own body is
that the patient's immune system is more likely to accept the printed replace-
ment organ. Debilitating immunosuppressive drugs, similar to the blood thin-
ners used by heart valve replacement patients, introduce a downstream cascade
of negative side effects. Printed heart valve implants made from a child's own
stem cells would be able to grow with the body and repair themselves.
CAD for the body
No matter how skilled the designer, it's impossible to boot up your computer
and pull up a “Body CAD” software program. Though some emerging types
of software are developing in that direction, we're light years away from being
able to design a new knee that's optimized for a female Tae Kwon Do black
belt who's 5 feet, 10 inches tall, weighs 145 pounds, and is prone to repeated
knee injuries of the right medial ligament.
Commercial design software has been shaped by its origins: engineering
(product design) or computer graphics (animation or video games). One rea-
son for current limitations inherent in design software tools is the fact that
until recently, few people imagined that we would ever really need CAD for
the body. If you think about it, fabricating new body parts will likely follow
a similar design process to that of fabricating a new machine part or creating
a new animated movie.
In search of more insight into the notion of CAD for the body, I journeyed
west to the University of Utah, a world-class research university located in
a remote, but geographically stunning corner of the world. For decades,
the University of Utah has been a hotbed of innovation in digital imaging.
The list of Utah alumni reads like a
Who's Who
of computer graphics: John
Warnock, one of the founders of Adobe; Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar; and
Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and later Netscape. Nolan Bushnell,
