未来器官移植靠什么 3D打印部件愈加成熟

It’s a dark thought, and the sort of thing only a futurist would think of. Which is why I’m not surprised that Bre Pettis, founder and CEO of the 3D printing company Makerbot, brought it up. When I asked him about 3D-printed organs earlier this summer at the Northside Festival, a conference in Brooklyn, he told me that 3D-printed body parts won’t become a reality until autonomous vehicles arrive to market. It makes for a surprising connection between two futuristic technologies.
这是一个阴暗的想法，只有未来主义者才会产生这样的联想。因此当3D打印公司Makerbot创始人兼首席执行官布利o佩蒂斯抛出这个问题时，我并不感到意外。今年夏初，在布鲁克林的北边艺术节（Northside Festival）上，我询问他关于3D打印器官的问题，他回答说，直到自动驾驶汽车上市，3D打印人体器官才会成为现实。两项富于未来气息的技术就这样意外地联系在了一起。

“The self-driving car is coming, and right now, our best supply of organs comes from car accidents,” he said. “So, if you need an organ you just wait for somebody to have an accident, and then you get their organ and you’re better.” I suggested that was a dark way of looking at it.
佩蒂斯说：“自动驾驶汽车就要来了，而目前，人体器官的最佳来源是车祸。也就是说，如果你需要进行器官移植，你必须得等待有人出车祸。获得遇难者的器官后你就会好起来。”我说，这种看法可够阴暗的。

His response: “We have this huge problem that we sort of don’t talk about, that people die all the time from car accidents. It’s kind of insane. But the most interesting thing is, if we can reduce accidents and deaths, then we actually have a whole other problem on our hands of, ‘Where do we get organs?’ I don’t think we’ll actually be printing organs until we solve the self-driving car issue. The next problem will be organ replacement.”
佩蒂斯回答道：“随时都有人在车祸中丧生，但我们似乎很少谈论这个大问题。多少有些荒唐。不过，最有意思的事情是，如果我们能够减少车祸数量和丧生人数，那么我们真的会遇到另一个棘手的大问题，那就是‘人体器官从哪儿来?’我觉得在解决自动驾驶汽车的问题之前，3D打印人体器官并不会真的实现。接下来的问题将是器官替换。”

It’s not impossible to 3D-print an organ, he said, but there are challenges around raw materials. “Right now you take liver goo, and you squeeze liver goo into the shape of a liver and it grows together and hopefully becomes a liver. That’s the idea of 3D printing organs,” he said. The challenge, he said, will be getting the science of the “liver goo” right, before the actual printing part even comes into play.
他指出，3D打印人体器官并非不可能，但原材料方面有一些难点。“现在的方法是取来肝细胞，把它们弄成肝脏的形状，再盼着它们生长发育成肝脏。这就是3D打印人体器官的思路。”佩蒂斯说，难点在于正确地“取来肝细胞”，随后才是真的进行3D打印。