Edge of technology 3D printing and other amazing inventions

Nike is one company which has embraced 3D printing and has saved many thousands of dollars and hundreds of days each year. Previously, a prototype of a new running shoe would have been manufactured as a one-off product at great expense. Now, a design can be created by a 3D printer within days for hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. The design can be easily tweaked, too, with changes printed the very same day.

General Electric recently made known that it had 3D printed a part for one of its jet engines. Significantly, the technology allowed the company to produce a component in a single part rather than up to 20 parts, making it stronger and more fuel efficient, not to mention cheaper to make.

Consider also the reality of being able to bioprint human organs for testing and replacement. As improbable as it may seem, it is already possible to print stem cells, which can be transformed into any other part of the human body, from hearts, livers, kidneys, bone and skin.

Till today, organ replacement meant being added to a waiting list and hoping that a donated and compatible organ becomes available before it is too late. Even in the developed world this can take years.

NASA announced recently that it has 3D printed a part for a rocket engine. The prototype part is smaller than the finished fuel injector will be, but in tests it showed itself capable of withstanding the heat and pressures it will be subjected to.

The injector would have taken a year to make, using traditional design and manufacturing methods. However, according to NASA, the 3D printed part was fashioned in just four months and at a cost which amounted to a 70% saving.

“Nasa recognises that on Earth and potentially in space,” says Nasa’s associate administrator for space technology, Michael Gazarik, “additive manufacturing can be game-changing for new mission opportunities, significantly reducing production time and cost by ‘printing’ tools, engine parts or even entire spacecraft.”

NASA is planning a manned mission to Mars. A new part cannot be sent out to another planet to replace a broken one, but even over many millions of miles a replacement design can be beamed to the spacecraft and made in a day.
Print your own medicine

Africa is not another planet; however, it is not difficult to see how such a technology could be the ‘game-changer’ NASA claim it is. Perhaps the most staggering application for 3D printing and surely among the most exciting for Africa is pharmaceuticals.
Lee Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow, claimed to have already created a prototype printer that can 3D print drugs.

“The idea is that we want to have a universal set of [chemical] inks,” Cronin explained to the audience, “that we put out with the printer and you download the blueprint – the organic chemistry – for that molecule and you make it in the device.” This means, he added, that “ultimately you can print your own medicine.”

In one technological stroke, the dominance of the pharmaceutical giants is diminished. Distribution channels will be bypassed. For decades, expensive patented drugs were out of the reach of many millions of Africans. But there now exists the very real possibility that in the near future, no matter how remote and inaccessible you are, an illness can be diagnosed and a drug can be made available within hours, and all for a cost considerably less than that of today.

Cronin went on to describe a future where a patient’s stem cells are analysed, and a drug tailored for that individual and not for the mass market can be made, which would be simply too expensive to do employing conventional methods. It is exciting also to imagine the prospect of an outbreak of a novel ‘superbug’ such as SARS or an attack of cholera being analysed and mapped and a drug to combat it being designed and put online, leaving the printer’s operator to Google it.

One can readily imagine an NGO buying and distributing 3D printers for this purpose and training local people to operate them, keeping them stocked with chemical ink and neatly sidestepping the common and expensive problems of distributing drugs to far-flung communities.

Of course, there is also the inevitability that just as young people are making fortunes designing apps for smartphones in their bedrooms, so chemistry graduates will sell the blueprints for designer drugs intended for purely recreational purposes and not necessarily even illegally.