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.