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MadDocsDuck t1_jdq1hmk wrote

I'm not sure if I missed something but in my lecture on tissue engineering it sounded like printed organs are something like 20-30+ years away. There are problems with the cell density, the cell type diversity and the vascularization. We don't even have proper organ models for medical testing yet. And then you will have to go through all the clinical testing and legal processes. Don't mean to be a downer but I thing that is quite some time away, at least from what I've heard.

Also, I wouldn't expect them to surpass the real thing for quite some time after the introduction. They may be better than a failing organ but it is quite safe to assume that our organs are already performing at a very high efficiency rate given the biological compoments.

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Phoenix5869 t1_jdq3wob wrote

> 20-30+ years away

at best

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AndrewSshi t1_jdqlvg9 wrote

Like commercial fusion, twenty years away and always will be.

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Strungbound t1_jdqxeq6 wrote

There are good reasons beyond this besides "scientists overpredict all the time."

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RamaSchneider t1_jdq29kc wrote

(Asking from general ignorance) I've read about telomeres and telomerase and how the telomeres keep shrinking as our cells divide and how once that telomerase is gone, the cell is dead.

Any accuracy there?

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gopher65 t1_jdsjmbk wrote

That is just the cell's self destruct flag. It minimizes the chances that the cell will live long enough to aquire enough DNA damage that it becomes cancerous.

It's the "kill me before" date, if you will. That isn't what damages cells though. Living does that:P.

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IndigoFenix t1_jdrntah wrote

This is the primary mechanism, though the benefit for this system is that it makes cancer much less likely. A potential cancer cell must activate its telomerase production or the tumor will die once its cells have divided more than they are supposed to.

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RavenWolf1 t1_jdu2g2c wrote

The Current progress with AI probably will bring this tech way faster that 20-30 years. Especially if we get ASI at next decade.

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MadDocsDuck t1_jducokl wrote

Mate, AI will not solve all problems. You can expect it to take years until there is an AI capable of working on these problems. Biology/Medicine is a very AI unfriendly field because it is very expensive and time consuming to generate test data thus it is very difficult to train AI models.

Think about the GPT models, they have millions if not billions of examples. On the other hand, a simple cell line takes 6 weeks to grow, then sone time to perform experiments, then some for data analysis.

Even if there were 100k people (which is a generous estimate) working on this problem and we assume a generous 10 weeks per experiment and that all experiments are successfull there will be 520k experiments a year. That is such a massive overestimate and still not enough for a really powerful AI tool.

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RavenWolf1 t1_jdvy3eb wrote

ASI will solve all problems pretty fast if we get it. It is called technological singularity for a reason.

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