Submitted by TheRappingSquid t3_122bq27 in Futurology
So organ printing is getting pretty far. Reckon we'll see a time where we'll straight up get organs made of plastic that surpass the one's we're born with? Maybe even soon? Plastic 'n tech can break, sure, but it can't get sick. Will old folks with printed hearts not have to worry about heart disease? How might this effect aging?
Bro, I can’t even go 2 years without having to replace my headlights in my Tacoma…
Lmao, eat more vegetables and live forever or HAMBURBGOR
I think you have a better chance with printed living organs from the patients own stem cells.
Fair enough, but I was thinking about how cell's degrade with age, y'know? If there was a way to print "fresh" organs without the sort of genetic damage, then that'd be great too.
The question is in rejection.
Plastic won't be good anytime soon (I mean, without consuming drugs to contain them), while organic has issues of their own.
STEM is good and nice, but we won't know for sure, since it requires study in a long run ( I mean, we need to understand how it will mutate in human body, can we control it and so on in 20-40 years).
I don't know about organs made out of plastic, but it's conceivable that the cells employed for bio ones could be genetically modified to be improved over the originals.
Yes, if genetic damage can be reversed and then those cells are used to print organs, you'd be "born" again. The advantage of that is that those organs can regenerate, whereas plastics may degenerate. But if there are applications where plastic is more durable, we should use those.
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.
(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?
>Plastic 'n tech can break, sure, but it can't get sick.
There are organism evolving to eat plastic more and more. I suspect someday plastic diseases will come into play.
The only people who would get them would be the super rich and I’ll be damned if I want those sorry bastards to live forever.!
So far organs have proven to be too complicated to be easily printed let alone made artificially entirely. The only internal organ we even stand a chance at right now is the heart. The heart is surprisingly easy as it's just a sack of muscles, with blood vessels running around it. All the other organs are far too intricate and finely structured.
Looking into the future I would say, that organs grown from your own DNA in Zero G in orbit would be our best bet. A lot of things have to happen to make this affordable.
Yes that is true. However, that is not the only reason cells die after a certain amount of time. If you want more information about that you can look up Hayflick limit (wiki article)
> 20-30+ years away
at best
Printed organs / artificial organs are optimistically 20 / 30 years away at best. This frankly isn’t something you have to think about, at least not for a long time
I am ready to get ripped with some chrome, choomba!
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People like Paolo Macchiarini really hurt plastics' and STEM cells chances too.
Printed organs, especially the brain, are easily 100-200 years away from a technology standpoint. We will live on places other than the earth by the time this tech emerges if ever.
Oh my god imagine viruses made out of plastic. I dunno if it's possible, but them viral fuckers are WEIRD
Cells don’t degrade as much as they lose their ability to regenerate. Cells rejuvenating is all but what you want from printing fresh organs. Adding plastic to the mix, in my opinion, causes more problems than it solves.
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if replacing headlights meant having to open up someones chest and rip open their rib cage, they'd probably make them a bit more durable.
In this domain the most exciting thing is neuromapping as it is the only thing which can bring us close to immortality. In my religion we believe that the soul is our conscious mind,as long as the brain is working we are alive. If we map our brain to a droid we are practically immortal as our consciousness is in a near immortal body
New thyroid that can make me lose weight? Sign me up!
But after the rich got it, it wouldn’t be profitable to the owner of the immortality pill to wait for the 99% of humanity to get rich somehow. Thus, the price will be in the equilibrium of lowest possible to be able to be paid by the most amount of people, and most expensive possible so that you earn the highest amount of money. So, much more people than just the rich.
Please we need artificial organs!!! You probably need them right now if you’re +30 like me. An artificial spine to prevent back pain, artificial eyes to not have hyper/hypometropia, artificial hair follicules for baldness, etc. we already have artificial teeth and most people prefer them.
It’s probably going to be your tissue grown on a scaffold to avoid rejection rather than a full artificial organ as in Repomen but we might need those as regrown organs mature or as a stopgap while a spare organ is grown for you.
Yeah, those arnt built to last, they're built with a shelf life so you buy another set
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Naw they’d bake in an easy access port to the body and implement planned obsolescence to ensure regular expensive surgical maintenance and care to milk insurance.
Edit spelling easy
Nah, the movie repo men seems like a more accurate depiction of how synthetic organs would play out.
Fuck youre right. I hate capitalism
2060 and the pacific organ patch is bigger than ever.
Scientists say for $40 billion, they've found a way to scoop up plastic kidneys, but hearts and minds are still proving to be a problem.
iKidney ...takes until version 6.5 before it produces urine, but other offbrand kidneys have had the feature since day 1.
Apple claims it invented round blood cells.
How can you equate creating an artificial brain to something vastly more simple in comparison such as an organ? Yes they are both complex tasks but one is quite clearly unfathomably more difficult to accomplish than the other. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think we’ll see printed organs aside from the brain within the next few decades
Oh god, I'm dying..print me a new heart!
Unable to print HEART. Out of Liver Cells. Please replace Cartridge.
That’s assuming that Capitalism plays fair, which it does not.
There's a point where a product becomes too inconvenient to buy, and it stops selling. People don't buy with no mind. That's what doomers who believe in that npc nonsense think. People are lazy about research not actively suicidal in their apathy.
If you sell an organ that fails every time and needs to be replaced. That organ will not be bought. It's to expensive to keep getting it and someone will sell a cheaper one to undercut competition. Apple gets away with it cause their a status symbol. No one can show off their custom heart to wow the common folk. It works less well if it's not packed in properly
You have a point BUT there’s a progression here.
First they’re going to be crappy emergency-only replacements that break down. And it’ll probably be like that for 10-20 years.
Then they’ll move into the “pretty good option” phase when things go wrong but you can choose between a few treatments. That’s another 10-20.
Then they’ll be in the “unfair advantage” stage where they outperform natural organs and disqualify competitors. 50 years.
And then they’ll be the “most people get them in their late teens or twenties” thing, like braces.
why bother with PO, when they can just charge you a monthly subscription instead. PO is becoming out-dated in leiu of just, hardware that requires software to run. Your organs will be on monthly subscription. Don't meet your payments? We'll find a way to make you make your payments. Otherwise, well, nobody ever seems to care when landlords evict families onto the street, why would they care when we evict your organs from your body?
Like commercial fusion, twenty years away and always will be.
Your iKidney 6.5 has reached end of life.
If you still need this function you will need to upgrade to iBody 2, with embedded iPhone.
Upgrades to iBody 2...
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(Meanwhile, the beeping from iKidney 22 turns from "panicked" to "frenzied".)
Did anyone ever watch Incorporated where even artificial hearts had a subscription model and one poor kid almost had their heart taken away by the corporation for using a hacked heart or something along that line?
Yeah....I believe we may be heading in that direction.
Nah, you've got it all wrong.
The diet becomes mandatory to supply lubrication to the moving parts.
I appreciate the optimizing but you should really look at all the problems that occur when using artificial hearts. There is a reason heart transplants are gold standard and artificial hearts are just used for bridging.
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we've slowed down your iKidney to preserve its life.
it will now take 2hrs to empty your bladder.
Even if the heart can pump through the tiny openings left by all the sludge buildup, the added pressure will blow out something else.
You say it can't get sick, but I'm sure nature will find a way
There are good reasons beyond this besides "scientists overpredict all the time."
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Well and even a matching organ from the same blood type has a very good chance of being viewed as a foreign object in the body. I know there's different meds and procedures to keep that from happening but still, I think you'd have to trick the body into not viewing it as a foreign object..
Plastic? Printed organs are also bio. The printing is to arrange the cells. We are nowhere near the self renewing properties of living tissue. Even your grandma's new hips wear out in 8 to 10 years.
Brains are an organ. I hope you are right with your guess because millions of people need them asap.
It is my guess they are 40-50 years away from printing skin and simple organs like heart, liver, bladder, etc and that will be 100-200 years later. My guess is never on a complex organ like the brain.
Or Repo Men with Colin Farrell and Forest Whitaker
To be fair, most headlights functionally last 15 years. I would happily take a new organ ever decade and a half if it meant improved functionality.
Just need to figure out how to turn on and off cancer mode in cells.
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.
Printed organs made from cells and genetically engineered might be better than what we have. The body is a brilliantly complicated thing and it will be incredibly hard for us to make artifical organs as replacements because an organ is essentially a machine built of many tiny machines and the body has a lot of functions to clean and repair itself that a plastic organ simply wouldn't: macrophages that move withing the tissue, different types of nervous and sensory tissue that innervate different organs, the lymphatic system, etc. No artifical organs can top that right now.
Imagine just replacing each of your organs when they die and eventually you just go full Tin Man.
Makes sense, especially with printed organs they can greatly reduce the risk of rejection.
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They can if a patent is held and they kill all the competition in development or court. It's already being done with tons of pharma.
Or repo: the genetic opera
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.
And the liver. A lot of the functions of the liver are done on a cell by cell basis. So a big glob of cells will do at least some of the work. But it isn't a full liver replacement.
The whole printing organs business will be based on using the patients own stem cells to create the new organ. Rejection problems will not exist with this technology.
doubt it, organs have crazy shit like the heart has neurons in it, it's not just a pump
Made of plastic? Unlikely, but we might see replacement organs grown from our own cells someday...
The Current progress with AI probably will bring this tech way faster that 20-30 years. Especially if we get ASI at next decade.
Ugh capitalism. I’m going to HATE when they charge money to save my life and drastically improve my everyday life. This system is the worst
Healthcare is a right, not a product. As such it is free at the point of service in most of the civilised world.
Repoman was a documentary.
All the convenience of printers and the pleasure of heart surgery? Is this heaven?
Look up Yamanaka factors. Cells can be deaged.
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.
> Reckon we'll see a time where we'll straight up get organs made of plastic that surpass the one's we're born with?
I read the title and assumed 'printing' meant creating with living organisms not plastic.
We are already seeing a lot more regenerating using stem cells and parts from Pigs and Baboons not Plastic.
ASI will solve all problems pretty fast if we get it. It is called technological singularity for a reason.
Yeah but what I'm saying is that we won't get it
>ReportSaveFollow
there are emergency ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_heart
I dunno about neuromapping- like, I'd obviously be for it, but it seems that the human brain is fucking COMPLICATED. Like, the only way that would be possible would be in a breakthrough with quantum computing. Not even to mention that it wouldn't be a continuation but a copy- I'd be more interested in replacing the other, less complicated parts of the body with machinery while maintaining the brain as is
Exactly preserving the brain at all costs
The body pretty much always views it as a foreign object unfortunately, which means the current organ transplants (such as kidneys) will only last about 10 years or so before they get worn down by the body constantly attacking them (this is even with immunosuppressants), then the patient is back to their old state or possibly even worse.
I did, they are interesting :o I hope that goes somewhere, if not just to quell my fear of mortality '>->
No it’s literally not. You can believe and hope it is all you want, but unfortunately it is not. And just because it is paid for by governments in other countries does not mean that it is a “right” there either.
The American system is hugely broken and needs an overhaul. But to believe because you are born you are entitled to other humans caring for/mending you is asinine.
First: all rights are made up. Second some country have it in there constitution that healthcare is one of the right enjoyed by their citizens. So that's that. You being ignorant about them doesn't change the facts and reality of how people live. You may not like it but this is what peak human rights look like.
It is currently being studied by Dr. David Sinclair and showing great promises.
Too likely to be rejected and risks polluting the body. Not to mention any damage cannot be repaired. The replaceable nature of cells is an advantage for longevity if we can improve their function.
Fair enough point, but let me return with a counterpoint: what if instead of a big, clunky plastic organ, we used singular artificial cells instead? Like, say, individual, simple nano-cells programmed to replace dead organic cells? Think it'd be possible to create an artificial cell with such parameters as to deter rejection? (Maybe if you dressed them up nicely and gave them a bouquet of roses to give the organic cells?)
I've looked at that, and while I want to he optimistic, some of the information given there seems to be a bit vague. Like, all cards on the table, the mouse rejuvenation shit is IMPRESSIVE. But it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of actual info being given about it, rather instead it seems there's information being given on the benefits of it. Also, how far along is that really? Because I've seen many of the same information recycled in different articles over the span of a few years-. I'll gladly believe it if I see anything else about it, but when it comes to fields such as gene therapy/rejuvenation for an extended health span, or space travel, or bionic arms, I feel like it's easy to get swept up in the hype of it rather than actually understanding it. Personally, I'm the type to fully believe that all that fun scifi shit can be real- maybe even soon, but I wanna make sure I have my facts straight too.
Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Well I'm 20, so assuming I don't get hit by a bus or falling space debris or some shit I'll keep this in mind
Lmao, did you intentionally use the the meme format of “you may not like it but this is what peak ____ looks like?” Cause If yes, very funny. If not, then you may have the brain worms.
Please find me a constitution with healthcare as a “right”. I just looked and couldn’t find one. I’m sure you will provide me a list of countries that provide free healthcare, which again does not mean it’s a right.
Also, “rights are made up”. K so saying healthcare is a right is a made up meaningless statement? Just confusing
Justice is made up. Good and evil is made up. Those are all concepts that mean different things to different people from different time and culture. It means what it means.
When I say something is a right, it is meant as "in a proper society, it should be treated with the same importance we give to other rights".
Nothing has inherent meaning. Meaning is something we construct to not go insane from a meaningless universe because our brain has evolved to recognize patterns as a way to improve our chances of survival and has gotten too good at it for our own comfort.
I don't see how your ignorance/google ineptitude really has anything to do with me... and why I should be given homework to compensate for your apparent lazyness... so I'll give you the first result on my google research:
That would be S. Korea.
Also, (bonus down the google research) the EU Charter of Fundamental rights has it so Citizens of any European country that recognize that Charter as valid would have a right to health care even if their country doesn't specify it in it's own constitution. So there's that too.
Lastly, it was an intentional use of the meme, but IF I had brain worms, I could get my head checked for free since I don't live in a third world country.
I think we'll eventually get there, no clue on a time range.
Correct but some people are allergic to scalpels... How quickly a body could transition from one material to another is a valuable quandary to wade through and whether the body would adjust to the new reality without issue is another entirely; if aging were not a problem, old men would out-compete young men in any dating pool as they would quickly recover from hormone deficiency and production issues...
A+ on your homework and your sense of humor than. On time too!
Good to know thanks. You’re right then.
My point, which I think intersects with your other comment is that a right is something inherent. In my opinion a right is something you “have” from the moment you’re birthed. The list of those rights is extremely small.
Governments can give you other rights like we have in the US. My bet was that while they’ve nationalized healthcare in many countries, they wouldn’t list it as a right. Because in my mind, that means no refusal of service no matter the procedure/ailment. As mentioned I was wrong.
But I stick to my point that healthcare is a product and the only nuance is who is paying.
Boiling it down if we go into the apocalypse tonight and a baby is born in the woods of South Korea tomorrow, no one is going to stop everything theyre doing for themselves to survive in order to go to tend to the baby. But the babies right to pursue happiness, live freely, and speak whatever it wants to speak (once able) still will be there.
That’s how I view a right
>But I stick to my point that healthcare is a product and the only nuance is who is paying.
We also have a right to a certain amount of security. That's why countries have armies and police forces. Those (ideally/theoretically) exist for defence and to maintain orders so citizens can pursue happiness and not get raided by hordes of barbarians or assaulted or what have you. That's what government are supposed to exist for. As a society we decide that something is important for everyone, we put our money in a big pool and we use the pool to ensure that the underlying right is secured.
It works for the army and the police in the US, it also works for healthcare elsewhere.
Of course it's not free and someone pays for it. Same as roads and fire stations. You don't pay when you need them, they're paid for from taxes because they help society function (and healthy citizenry can be argued to also do that).
D_Ethan_Bones t1_jdpo93s wrote
> Will old folks with printed hearts not have to worry about heart disease?
I'm not expecting the version-1.0 RoboHeart to be able to keep up with the American diet, it might be slightly better than the original thing but let's not have unlimited expectations here.