Medical Fab
Last November (and March before that) I wrote about "fab labs" - printers for solid objects.
The basic principle is easy to understand. You take a design for any product you like in the form of a computer CAD file, load it into a fabricator, and your product is built up little by little just like an inkjet printer deposits ink on a page.
This is not nanotech universal assembly technology that's years away. These fabricators are being built and tested today. They start with standardized materials and simply build whatever they are asked to build within their capability.
The standardized material that will probably be used the most is plastic. A specialized wood product or even metal would probably be quite doable too. But what about other materials? What about human cells?
Scientists at Manchester University have developed a printer able to produce human skin to help wounds heal.It could be used on patients who have suffered burns and disfigurements. With more research it could even replace broken bones.
Using the same principle as an ink-jet printer, experts are able to take skin cells from a patient's body, multiply them, then print out a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to the body. The wound's dimensions are entered into the printer to ensure a perfect fit.
Via KuzweilAI
The "printout" is made onto a special type of plastic that dissolves into the body. This is the future of skin graphs and might be the future for bone graphs/replacement and maybe even organ transplants.
Imagine using this technology in facial reconstruction! A person's face could be rebuilt skin, muscle and bone onto a plastic mask-type scaffold tailor-made to the patient.
More good news: this Manchester group is working as fast as they can to beat competitors here in the United States and in Japan. This group hopes to start clinical trials shortly and have a marketable system in five years.