Topic: ¡Science! (Read 61550 times)

Burrito Al Pastor · « **Reply #40 on:** August 16, 2008, 12:34:14 PM »

They'll shut up when somebody explains to them that it will lead to robot bodies which will allow them to personally ruin the country forever.

Brentai · « **Reply #41 on:** August 16, 2008, 01:13:49 PM »

They'll shut up when somebody explains to them the oil and energy consumption requirements of a robot body.

Fuck, they're probably shutting up already.

sei · « **Reply #42 on:** October 21, 2008, 11:41:57 AM »

If HP's pieces of shit get into this business, someone's fucked.

A² · « **Reply #43 on:** October 21, 2008, 11:49:22 AM »

Quote

Robot Bodies

I'd do it.

Brentai · « **Reply #44 on:** October 21, 2008, 11:50:00 AM »

It apparently turns sad babies into the protagonists of shounen sports manga.

I gotta admit, that kicks the shit out of that other materials printer, which could at best make flimsy models and food you don't want to eat.

The Artist Formerly Known As Yoji · « **Reply #45 on:** October 21, 2008, 12:02:55 PM »

I saw something about this on TV some months back. Looks like a great idea, even without the bullshit holographic displays.

Does this mean no Ghost in the Shell artificial bodies for us?

Brentai · « **Reply #46 on:** October 21, 2008, 12:49:43 PM »

Well, probably not. Even if the guy can get a functional humanoid heart out of his replicators, the chances of an actual human being not rejecting the weird thing are probably not so good.

sei · « **Reply #47 on:** October 21, 2008, 01:06:21 PM »

Quote from: 4th paragraph in that article

The advantage of this inkjet-like technique is that the heart will be produced with cells coming from the patient therefore the body will not reject it.

Brentai · « **Reply #48 on:** October 21, 2008, 03:22:48 PM »

Mongrel · « **Reply #49 on:** October 21, 2008, 03:34:13 PM »

Yes, but just because you make a pile of shit out of cells taken (or grown) from the original host body, that's no guarantee that the thing will operate as well as a heart that grew in your own body since you were in the womb. Or that it will work at all.

Maybe after another few decades or centuries they can makes lattices and get it all to work reasonably well, we'll see, but printing out cell layer by cell layer like some kind of lego heart, well, that's not the way hearts grow in nature, and such a process will always be inferior to the real thing. I guess the real question is "how inferior?"

patito · « **Reply #50 on:** October 21, 2008, 04:12:39 PM »

Or maybe it will work even better than one made by nature. Just because it's manmade doesn't mean it's automatically worse. Though I agree that the technology is probably in its infancy right now and that's why it may not work as well as the real thing.

François · « **Reply #51 on:** October 21, 2008, 04:20:45 PM »

If I happened to run into Mola Ram in the subway, I wouldn't hesitate too much over the choice between an inferior man-made heart and death.

Sharkey · « **Reply #52 on:** October 21, 2008, 04:59:21 PM »

Quote from: patito on October 21, 2008, 04:12:39 PM

Or maybe it will work even better than one made by nature. Just because it's manmade doesn't mean it's automatically worse. Though I agree that the technology is probably in its infancy right now and that's why it may not work as well as the real thing.

It's true. The wheels I've been making, though ugly and somewhat out of round, are much nicer than the naturally occurring wheels I've been finding lying around, which tend to come in an incredible variety of shapes, none of which have been satisfyingly wheel-like. Actually, they make terrible noises when I put an axle through them. At least for a few minutes, though they do conveniently provide their own grease.

The same thing with this artificial fire bit. It's less initially impressive than a lightning strike, but it makes for a hell of a lot less waiting and isn't as likely to make my teeth glow and my eyeballs boil out of my head.

Mongrel · « **Reply #53 on:** October 21, 2008, 05:06:30 PM »

Quote from: ZedPower on October 21, 2008, 04:20:45 PM

If I happened to run into Mola Ram in the subway, I wouldn't hesitate too much over the choice between an inferior man-made heart and death.

Well, that's no different than artifical hearts nowadays.

I guess I wasn't nearly clear enough.

I'm not some kind of Luddite decrying this as a heathen invention, nor am I saying it's total fail. What I am saying is that there are existing research programs to grow replacement tissues that are far more legit than this gimcrackery.

WHY do you need to use a printer to do this? Hearts do not grow that way. Existing programs try to grow tissues in a more natural way, using lattices and/or natural encouragements (hormones, receptor chemicals, etc) as the closer you can get the process to real-life growth conditions the more likely you will be rewarded with successfully functioning organs and healthy tissue.

Adding a printer to the mix imposes an artificiality on the process that greatly increases the chances of failure. Yes, this has a Shadowrun instant-gratification coolness about it, but it's ultimately a bad idea. Even if the printout can be made to act as he desires, the cells will not gel the way you might be thinking. Even if you can magically print out a ready-made heart in a few hours, the cells are still human cells. They need time to come to life, to grow together, to gain strength and to begin to function in harmony as an organ. And the best encouragement to this is for those cells to grow together, as opposed to being printed out line-by-line, like someone's homework assignment.

It's not that horrible a thing, I'm sure, and if someone's funding him, hey might as well give it a try. It may have solid applications for monocultures like skin grafts, tissue patches, etc. (though, those too have their own grow-a-new-one research programmes), but at worst it will detract from far more legitimate research.

I know modern medicine is pretty miraculous, but the human body is not a modular assembly-line product, with plug-in or screw-in replaceable parts. Nor will it ever be. If we do eventually gain the ability to replace whole organs in a hurry, it will because we have learned to perfectly tailor those replacements to the patient, not because we made a rack of standardized mass-produced hearts and managed to standardise the human species to match.

Sharkey · « **Reply #54 on:** October 21, 2008, 05:20:26 PM »

Man, I was with you up until you started using technical terms like "gel" when talking about cells. The rest of the jargon went right over my head.

Mongrel · « **Reply #55 on:** October 21, 2008, 05:27:50 PM »

Okay. My wife has pointed out while you can't just print an instant replacement heart, such a printer COULD be useful for printing out a fetal heart (the human heart essentially reaches it's final form at 32 days of gestation), but you would still have to spend months growing it to adult size, coaxing it with a combination of growth hormones and other careful encouragement. So I'm both right and wrong.

Given that she's a Cardiologist, I'm not exactly going to argue with her.

Brentai · « **Reply #56 on:** October 21, 2008, 05:35:59 PM »

Growing it where, though? Wouldn't you need to cultivate it inside the body you're trying to put it into?

Note, the guy who made this is a pediatrician, so he may not have built the machine with fully-developed organs in mind.

Sharkey · « **Reply #57 on:** October 21, 2008, 05:41:45 PM »

Cows.

Ideally, that's where we'd be growing whole babies.

Also, the mostly whole babies with the better parts of their brains scooped out so we wouldn't feel too bad about taking their hearts and everything else once they're ripe.

Also: Shit, man, you're married? We should have a poll for that kind of thing. I really need to know just how many of you have ever gotten hitched or stapled your dick to your upper thigh or whatever, just so I can not avoid making fun of it in the future.

Cthulhu-chan · « **Reply #58 on:** October 21, 2008, 06:42:29 PM »

Pigs would be more likely. We have a lot in common with them, biologically speaking.

There's a reason long pork is called the other other white meat.

Romosome · « **Reply #59 on:** October 21, 2008, 08:35:03 PM »

Lattices for larger organs run into problems with development because hearts don't naturally grow in vats, either, so it becomes a surface area issue: inner cells don't receive proper nutrients during the growth process once covered by other cells and die off. At least that's what I remember hearing, I was really interested in tissue engineering years ago when it first started becoming feasible.

If anything, I'd worry a printed young heart that has to mature would be less reliable than a printed adult heart; You print a heart that's supposed to stay like that and sometimes repair itself, you have a good chance. Print a heart that's supposed to grow naturally and what's to say the right cellular triggers will go off in the right spot? Wouldn't you have to account for all the cytoplasmic contents that determine such things, half of which we know nothing about? It's a huge gray area.

Once again, though, organ printers are probably going to be best applied to emergency surgery and first aid. A machine that could print new blood vessels and tissue back onto a cleaned wound and then lay fresh new skin right over it. Select area regeneration; it'd be like spot-welding a leak in a human.

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Author Topic: ¡Science! (Read 61550 times)