Mary Roach

Wrong?

I would say...

Did you see a lot of 3D printers?

I spent a day and a half in a

Carnegie Mellon has a 3D bioprinting lab.

It was super interesting.

They were not printing bone, but in general, extracellular material like collagen and things that don't need to be fed.

If you're printing an organ or you're printing skin, you need to feed it.

It's like, what does that mean?

You're going to print the capillaries.

You're going to hope that the thing grows its own capillaries, which the body is really great at doing.

up to a point.

So that's kind of what they're trying to tease out.

How much do we have to print versus how much can we let leave to the body to do to kind of like create on its own?

There are 3D printed, probably titanium bits and pieces of bone that take the person's MRI and match that way.

But those sorts of things for sure are being used in addition to bits and pieces of cadaver donor bone.

So they are doing some amazing stuff with

Artificial materials for broken, bashed up joints, bones.

So if you're not using plastic like that, if you're using squishy material, that whole process of doesn't work well because it's squishy.

You need a solid base that you're building from the bottom up.