Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Worthless: 3D printing is nothing but a nerd fad that won't leave hobbyist workshops.

6 (3%)

Unimportant: 3D printing will become common but won't be useful for much other than tiny full plastic objects.

8 (4%)

Minor Importance: 3D printing will function as a light industry that will coexist with existing manufacturing methodologies.

43 (21.4%)

Moderate Importance: 3D printing will challenge and slowly replace a large number of existing manufacturing businesses.

104 (51.7%)

Major Importance: 3D printing will completely flip the table on conventional manufacturing and quickly destroy existing business for anything you can make with them.

20 (10%)

Critical: 3D printing will disrupt conventional ideals of work and money so much that they collapse and are replaced in a paradigm shift.

20 (10%)

Total Members Voted: 199

[Knight of Fools]

Organs? Why not!

[10ebbor10]

I haven't heard anything about printing organs yet.

Linkies
Linkies

They have done ears and jaws already, and are working on heart valves

[freeformschooler]

Note that the title of the thread is particularly relevant because the Pirate Bay has a section specifically for 3D printables. Not gonna link it since, you know, I'm sure there's illegal content in there somewhere. But still, pretty neat.

[10ebbor10]

@10ebbor10

which they hope will one day be capable of producing functional human body parts.

indicating it is just aesthetic, at present.

one day will be able to do this, according to Dr. Anthony Atala

not done it yet, and he may be wrong.

The article is quite old. Some progress has been made in the mean time.
They made and implanted a fully functional jaw bone already, and in fact made some simple organ tissue too.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

3D printing of organs and the like is actually very doable, because cells are very receptive to being layered in the way 3D printers build things.

[mainiac]

I have real trouble seeing how those links translate into a functioning organ.  They're just making the shape of an organ and it's all homogeneous.  Could you even treat tissue in that way and would it work afterwards?  This answers pretty much nothing.

[nenjin]

You can make a fully functional gun from a 3d printer.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I have real trouble seeing how those links translate into a functioning organ.  They're just making the shape of an organ and it's all homogeneous.  Could you even treat tissue in that way and would it work afterwards?  This answers pretty much nothing.

A tissue mass made out of the correct cells in the correct shape of a specific organ is functionally indistinguishable from that organ and there is no foreseeable reason it would fail to work. If the cells that make up the tissue are still alive after being printed, which as I recall they are, then there is no reason why the tissue and thus the organ won't work.

What will probably be the problematic part of this is having to make sure the printer creates all the small blood vessels that run throughout organs, which I imagine will take quite some time to map out.

[mainiac]

A mass of living cells lumped together =/= tissue.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Hence why we don't have this in every hospital right now, but the problems are being worked on. The medical benefits of a working tissue and organ printer cannot be overstated, so once this starts to show results I don't think they'll have much trouble getting research funding.

[Lagslayer]

I can see it making a great deal of, if not the majority of, smaller manufactured goods. For the foreseeable future, however, larger things will be more quickly or efficiently produced using other methods. Not to mention that printed materials have different qualities from materials otherwise handled. I'm not sure exactly what timespan I'm talking about here, but at least several decades, I'm thinking.

[sneakey pete]

Minor importance.

I don't get why people assume that this is cheaper? Its not really cheaper for any large scale production run of something with simple geometry. You're not going to be able to 3d print cups cheaper than a factory can die cast them in plastic. The "but you can print the printer" argument is true. But most people seem to assume that the stuff you print with has no cost. It does. You also have an electricity cost. Not to mention, you simply cannot 3d print a lot of things that we commonly use thesedays. They don't have the accuracy to print bearings, for example, but you can still finish things they make to get good finishes, and it will probably take a very long time, if at all, before they are up to scratch to do that.

In the end, it'll become of minor importance to industry. It does fill a very important low production and prototype role for industry, but its not some sort of world changing thing thats going to change the entire economic fabric of manufacturing.

[mainiac]

Hence why we don't have this in every hospital right now, but the problems are being worked on. The medical benefits of a working tissue and organ printer cannot be overstated, so once this starts to show results I don't think they'll have much trouble getting research funding.

But the hard part of this is the part we haven't done.  It's like having a bunch of brakepads and thinking that means you are on the verge of having a city bus network.

[Moghjubar]

Moderate, with emphasis on 'slowly'.

We still need to get them common as 2d printers in homes, and then some, first.  Then, some things at the very least should become printer default, instead of gas cost + time.  As for pricing...even with insane ink prices, few people go to a copy shop every time they need to print something (or they just go around the ink prices with off-brand).  I see potentially the same thing happening for 3d.

As for more things and resolution... 'very slowly'

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Hence why we don't have this in every hospital right now, but the problems are being worked on. The medical benefits of a working tissue and organ printer cannot be overstated, so once this starts to show results I don't think they'll have much trouble getting research funding.

But the hard part of this is the part we haven't done.  It's like having a bunch of brakepads and thinking that means you are on the verge of having a city bus network.

More like having a fleet of buses that need engines and saying that you are on the verge of a city bus network. The hardest part of this was figuring out it could be done in the first place. Now it is only a matter of time.