PRINT THYSELF

This sort of procedure is becoming more and more common among doctors and medical researchers. Almost every day, I receive an e-mail from my hospital?s press office describing how yet another colleague is using a 3-D printer to create an intricately realistic surgical model?of a particular patient?s mitral valve, or finger, or optic nerve?to practice on before the actual operation. Surgeons are implanting 3-D-printed stents, prosthetics, and replacement segments of human skull. The exponents of 3-D printing contend that the technology is making manufacturing more democratic; the things we are choosing to print are becoming ever more personal and intimate. This appears to be even more true in medicine: increasingly, what we are printing is ourselves.

Source: Newyorker