3-D printing is one of the most fun tech
innovations of the last few years. It is will become an important and
widespread manufacturing technique and I’m constantly surprised at the new
items being printed.
The latest that caught my fancy was the Bonassar’s
printed ears featured in a webcast from Cornell U (1). The ink consists of a
bio-gloop with viable live cells and the printer prints out an ear. The raw ear
is then incubated for two months to let the cells do what live cells do and then
an ear-shaped piece of cartilage is ready to be implanted for the tissue to
grow around. Home printed cartilage is much more likely to last longer and work
better than silicon-based plastics.
The lab scans someone’s head the get a digital
image of their ear, which is then fed to the printer. At this point questions
bubble up. For example, what would they have done with van Gogh? Would the have
scanned his other ear and digitally inverted it? He would then have been in
possession of a pair of perfectly matched ears, a very unusual situation.
The thoughts move on to would there be a demand
among cosmetic surgery junkies seeking perfection to have their ears changed to
scanned versions of George Clooney’s or Britney Spears? Would the old Star Trek
fans be clamoring for Vulcan ears?
Once we move into ideas for doggy cosmetic surgery
our imaginations could run riot, but there is, of course, some important
possibilities. I heard a BBC news item about how a tail-less dolphin was coping
with an artificial tail. Dolphin tail-trouble is not as rare an occurrence as
might be imagined. In Japan, the vets persuaded Bridgestone tires to make a
rubber tail for Fuji as far back as 2004 (2).
