REPRINT – Originally aired December 2005

You are lying on the operating table waiting for you heart replacement surgery and a strange sound lulls you too sleep as the anesthesia kicks in. (dot matrix printer sound) An amazing leap in tissue engineering is in the works. The ability to actually print out living tissue, blood vessels and organs utilizing a biodegradable paper with an ink that is full of cells. These are stacked into 3D objects like vessels and when the paper breaks down the cells are left in tacked to form the needed replacement part. This paper has been developed with various elements including extracts from seaweed, collagen but the most promising seems to be molecular chains of sugar. “The cells are mixed in with the gel and put into a standard inkjet printer cartridge. The machine then spits out a gel sheet embedded with cellular dots containing a minuscule amount — about 1 microliter each.” (http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051114/organprinter_tec.html)
The paper acts as the framework to hold the cells together while the cells fuse together forming the final tissue structure that is desired. This process takes advantage of the natural ability of cells to repair tissue to create these structures.
Even though it can take just a few minutes to print out the sheets of bio-paper it takes weeks for the paper to break down and the natural processes of cellular growth to occur. The process starts with the blue print of the tissue to be created is created. Then the bioink is printed out in sheets that are stacked together to form the frame work. As the paper is eaten away or biodegrades the cellular fusion occurs creating the final tissue structure based off the original blue print.
The National Science Foundation is putting a lot of weight behind this process and in fact a new field of Bio-Manufacturing is being discussed at work shops and conferences all around the world. Workshops focusing on solid freeform fabrication, bio-coating, microfabrication, novel fabrication processes for cell and organ printing, and computer-aided tissue engineering were held in China last summer.
If you take this technique and look at the new 3D printers that are being developed the possibility to print 3D tissue or organ structures when we need them. Add to that the ability to use our own genetic structures in this process and the risk of our bodies rejecting these new organs could be a non-factor.
We are about 3-10 years out from this technology being implemented in the mass market but burn victims may soon be able to have skin printed or doctors may be able to use small tissue patches instead of sutures in the short term. Longer term the possibilities are staggering. Creating new skin, kidneys, livers, hearts arteries, veins etc. maybe even one day brains? Think of the future scenario mentioned at the beginning of this show. You have massive damage or a genetic defect to your heart and need a replacement. Your doctor takes the appropriate genetic samples brings up his computer and the blue print for a heart. He loads the genetic material into the bioink and prints you out a new heart.
The new Bio-Manufacturing industry will surly become a multi-billion dollar enterprise with vats of bioink and reams of bio-paper ready for transport to your local hospital. Maybe even a home version of the printer for those minor cuts and scrapes that we deal with in the course of our lives and you thought ink cartridges were expensive now. Just wait until your HMO has to cover this prescription ink and you have a co-pay every time you need to refill you printer.

NSF – http://www.nsf.gov/index.jsp
2005 FIBR Awards – http://nsf.gov/news/special_reports/fibr/awards.jsp
Printing Organs on Demand -http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,69701,00.html
New Paper Advances Organ Printing – http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051114/organprinter_tec.html
Organ Printing at University of Missouri – http://organprint.missouri.edu/
3D Printers – http://www.zcorp.com/

**Originally Aired December 2005 on Glimpse of Tomorrow** Text Transcript

The term neuromorphic was coined by Carver Mead, in the late 1980s to describe Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits that mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system.

“The brain does not execute coded instructions; instead it activates links, or synapses, between neurons. Each such activation is equivalent to executing a digital instruction, so one can compare how many connections a brain activates every second with the number of instructions a computer executes during the same time. Synaptic activity is staggering: 10 quadrillion (1016) neural connections a second. It would take a million Intel Pentium-powered computers to match that rate—plus a few hundred megawatts to juice them up.”A group of innovative engineers are developing what they hope will one day become a silicon replica of biological functions.

So let’s look at some numbers a little more closely. According to the Populations Reference Bureau in 2003 the world population was 6.3 billion. Using this figure in conjunction with the data from the UC Berkley research on how much information is produced each year we come up with a figure of about 800 MB per person per year.
It is estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human knowledge (including audio, video and text) was 12 exabytes. In 2002, it was estimated that people produced 5 exabytes (5 billion gigabytes) of data. “Tom Hawk, general manager for enterprise storage at IBM, says that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data–from websites to digital photos and video–than it generated in the previous 1,000 years.” [1] So an easy assumption will be that by 2008 we will have over 24 Exabytes worth of data and with that same growth rate of doubling the data produced every 3 years some where around 2025 we will reach a Zettabyte. If history holds true these simple estimations of the scope of data growth will be shattered in a much shorter time frame.
So what are we going to do to solve this problem? Like all daunting tasks human innovation and creative new ideas are trying to address these issues. Two front runners for physically storing all this data are Holographic Memory and Molecular Memory but other technologies are being developed that can meet or possible surpass the promise of the two discussed here.
Holographic Memory stores data using lasers and crystals or photopolymers. This technology can store data in 3D a phenomenon known as Bragg volume selectivity. Holographic drives can read or write a million bits at once, encoded as the interference pattern of two intersecting laser beams“Holograms can theoretically store equal to one bit per cubic block the size of the wavelength of light in writing. For example, light from a helium-neon laser is red, 632.8 nm wavelength light. Using light of this wavelength, one square inch of perfect holographic storage would be able to hold 1.61×1013 bits which is about 2,014 terabytes. One cubic inch of such storage would be able to hold 8,083,729,105 terabytes.” [3]
So theory aside a company called InPhase Technology has partnered with Bayer Material Science and created a device that utilizes Holographic Memory. “By 2006 they will introduce both a recording and reading device and a holographic data-storage medium, based on polymers made by Bayer MaterialScience, with a capacity of 300 gigabytes.” [4]They are also striving for smaller devices that will also use the technology. “InPhase promises two gigabytes of data on a chip the size of a postage stamp, or 20 gigabytes on one the size of a credit card.” Longer term the amount of data the devices can handle jumps significantly “discs with a capacity of up to 1.6 terabytes- equivalent to the content of about four million books or about 1.6 million high-resolution photographs. Such discs could be available by 2009” [4]
Molecular Memory is another contender for our future data storage solution.“The researchers’ ultimate goal is to pack 100 gigabits, or 100 billion bits, into one square centimeter of chip space using the molecular memory technology, he said. That’s at least 1,000 times more than is possible using standard semiconductor technology” [5] HP and a company called ZettaCore are working on this technology but it is still in development.

[1] The Fading Memory of the State – David Talbot -Technology Review –July 2005
[2] Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, “how-much-info@sims.berkeley.edu”http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/execsum.htm#summary

[3]Wikipedia
[4] Funding of Innovative Startups – Andrew Madden – Technology Review- July 2005

Population Reference Bureau– http://www.prb.org/

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years.Information flows through electronic channels — telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet — contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls – including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.