(In response to “Printing Organs on Demand”)

“Wow!” This one word basically sums up all my thoughts about the organ printing issue introduced to be in the article. I had no clue there was a research group funded by the National Science Foundation (amongst others) that grew organs. Of course, this research is still in its preliminary stages. Tissue engineering technology has been around and promises to solve the organ transplantation crisis, but the assembly of vascularized 3D soft organs remains a big challenge…until now. Growing organs and other tissue using the previous tissue engineering technology seemed to scientists to be taking to long; organ printing is computer-aided, jet-based 3D Tissue Engineering of living human organs and offers a possible solution to the slow growing organs by enabling rapid assembling of tissues and organs. Organ printing involves three sequential steps: pre-processing or development of ‘blueprints’ for organs; processing or actual organ printing; and post-processing or organ conditioning and accelerated organ maturation. Although, organ printing is still in its infancy, its prospects look good in solving the organ transplantation crisis. But how far will this go? The idea of printing organs, creating organs, seems to be a controversial one. If tissue can be grown, if organs can be grown, what else is can be grown? Could brains eventually be grown? If so, how soon or later will the technology be capable of growing man? Growing man (or woman) is a scary concept, but we can’t throw the possibility of it from happening completely out the window; at least, not with the ever-advancing technologies. To bring up another idea, if organ printing does work, could foods such as meats like steak cuts, eventually be printed?