Intellectual Property as the Gatekeeper of Life: 3D Printing of Organs and Tissues

by Stephan Kinsella on September 18, 2012

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Printing Evolves: An Inkjet for Living Tissue,” notes the promise of 3D printing for the creation of human organs or tissue:

Need an artery for bypass surgery or custom cartilage for that worn-out knee?

Hit print.

Need a new knee? What about an artery for bypass surgery? Some researchers are experimenting with techniques that build human tissue using patients’ own cells. WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz reports.

In about a dozen major university and corporate laboratories, biomedical engineers are working on ways to print living human tissue, in the hope of one day producing personalized body parts and implants on demand. Still far from clinical use, these tissue-engineering experiments represent the next step in a process known as computerized adaptive manufacturing, in which industrial designers turn out custom prototypes and finished parts using inexpensive 3-D computer printers.

Instead of extruding plastic, metal or ceramics, these medical printers squirt an ink of living cells. Researchers call it by the shorthand bioprinting.

Of course, the patent and copyright interests will fight this tooth and nail, and maybe kill it. Or seek to regulate and control it.¹ Imagine if IP really takes hold here: you could literally have IP in control of life and death. You cannot print out a replacement organ or tissue without some patent troll corporation’s permission. Unbelievable. The madness that is IP has to stop.