What Makes A Bio Printer - 1905 Words

Almost everyone has seen one of those doctor shows where the patient is waiting for a kidney but the wait is too long and they die. This is always the most depressing part of these movies because you had started to associate and connect with the patients. What if it did not have to end like that? What if the patient gets the dearly needed kidney in time and lives a nice full life? Sounds like the plot to an ordinary feel good movie but that could never happen in real life, right? Scientists and engineers everywhere have found a way to make this dream true by making a bio printer. What’s a bio printer you may ask? Well, a bio printer is a printer that prints living tissue. Sounds gross, right? Well yes and no. Yes in the fact we are†¦show more content†¦This is why a biological printer would be such an amazing tool in the medical field, the ethics have been highly questioned, however, the benefits of having such a machine and the efficiency of this new technology would completely outweigh any of the doubts one might have on their mind. To understand a bio printer, one must first understand the normal inkjet printer. This is the machine you go and make copies with in the office. The way an inkjet works is fairly simple: there is a robotic arm in the printer that runs over the paper spraying ink on the paper to form an image; a normal 3D printer will do the same. They have a robotic arm that swooshes back and forth building up a physical model. So when the hurdle of a bio printer was first addressed, scientists tried to make a normal 3D printer shoot out cells on a plate, eventually building up a group of cells in a graft or (whatever was being attempted at the time.) The rate of cell survival, according to the Australian Broadcasting Network is 95 percent. This is absolutely incredible. This method is more effective than even the original way: implanting another person’s bones or organs into the patient, which has an extremely high risk of infection, it also has a chance for the body just to reject it and send antibodies to kill the new organ. Although the ink jet method is an effective method, it is not the most practical. There is a different method that was invented because the ink jet method still destroys a