Stunning Medical Progress
 

This is jaw dropping news . I'm curious what new doors will be opened with this technique in the future...
http://mtbeurope.info/news/2012/1202005.htm

This kind of thing is already obsolete with fleshprinting and stem cell techniques. They won't make you a titanium jaw in the future, they'll grow you a new one from your own cells.

Yeah but I wanna titanium one! Be able to drive nails with my chin. That'd be cool! :D

i may be understanding genetics incorrectly...

but even using your own DNA to grow you a replacement jaw bone - assuming you needed the replacement at the age of 18 - would take 18 years to grow yes?

besides i think we are a short distance from perfecting such things.

In the mean time i think this presents something very helpful for people who have been involved in industrial accidents or who have had various bone structures badly shattered - or even for people who have had failed suicides.

I can't wait to see where medical technology is in another 20 years

No, it doesn't work that way. Growth speed is controlled by hormones secreted by the pituitary gland. The brain itself times how you grow, not your DNA.

So, we could grow a liver for a 30 year old ... in say, 1 year?

Wouldn't even take that long. Probably a few weeks at most. You don't even have to grow a whole liver, you only need around 25% of a normal liver to survive, and it's one of the only organs that regrows itself.

Most titanium alloys are actually quite soft, so you'd drive the nail, but end up bending your jaw. Then you'd have to heat it to over 700c to bend it back, and there goes the rest of your face.

Worse than that, his skin and muscles aren't made of titanium...

Thanks for crapping on my Terminator fantasy! :stare: :DL

I'm an old time aesthete, can I have my jaw in teak and walnut instead?

Make a carbon fiber jaw :DL

You could chew trough a train with those :DL

Carbon fiber is rejected by the body...

explains the rashes :dead:

in the meantime, its gonna look pretty freaky deaky when the muscles start growing around the jaw. im assuming thats the point of it yes? To simply replace the bone with a complex titanium jaw that would allow muscle and skin to grow around it? I wonder how long that will take.

I'm just kidding of course but it does raise a valid question. Is it wrong to improve what nature provides?

If we can someday replace our bone skeleton with a stronger one or make our skin tougher (that'd kill foruming :DL), or make longer lasting internal organs, should we?

Interesting question there.

I'd say its not wrong to improve ourselves, but the potential for abuse is so great it should be limited to replacing ill or damaged organs.

Making handicaped walk again and not seting a pole jump rekord by a mile and all that jazz

Plus, out own fragility makes us carefull, imagine what kind an idiot would a 400 000$ sportscar and a million dolar spine and bone upgrade would produce

Rapid prototyping has been used for ortho and maxiofacial reconstruction for a while now. The only thing really new is direct fabrication in metal instead of producing a wax/plastic master that is cast (lost wax).

They were doing rapid prototyping models as armatures to fabricate plates for this here in albuquerque in the 90s, actually (a friend's brother is a maxiofacial plastic surgeon). The rapid prototyping guys are nearby the seeking bullet guys out at Sandia :)

I did some work over there, actually. We were using plastics, but we got the tour of the selective laser sintering, and direct metal deposition machines, too. Cool stuff. They were working with the Navy as a way to provide spare parts on carriers. You have all the parts on disk, and you print replacements as needed (replacements were designed to get you back to port, not to replace originals---though that was so long ago, there may be no difference now).

Humans are no longer subject to the pressures of natural selection. If we want to improve as a species we have to do it ourselves.

If the power exists for someone to change something they don't like about themselves, who has the right to tell them they aren't allowed to?