Organ cloning, cybernetic implants and 3D printing.

I'm working on story set in around year 2050/60 and wanted to know which methods are most likely to dominate in field of organ replacements. Say one character looses palms (destroyed, so no old fashioned sewing back on). Which method is most likely to be used: a)if expenses are of no issue? b) if she has some money (she's part of and backed by non profit, semi military organization)? c)if she's dirt poor.

And are state hospitals going to be far behind private clinics in this area? With budget struggles and other reasons like it seems to be nowadays?

The fast answer is, whatever you want so long as it's justified in-story.

The long answer is that you aren't providing enough information to give a good answer. Skin grafts are pretty effective now, for example, so old-fashioned 'sewing back on' may be completely effective (the art of repatterning skin from her legs into calloused palm-skin would be more advanced, is all).

I want to know how these things could work out in our own Real Life future. I want my story be realistic in this regard. It is also not point of the story. It's just about patching up my characters when they sustain serious damage.

And I doubt skin grafting would do. She gets explosive material jammed through her hands and then detonated. There are no palms (or whatever that portion of hand is called in English) left whatsoever. Before she makes her next appearance, I got to figure out if prosthetics or organic replacement is more realistic.

If all she's lost is the skin/flesh of her palms, then there's no reason to think they couldn't grow her some new skin on a 3d printer; while the technology isn't there yet, that's one of the functions they've speculated 3d printers could be good for.

As to how she gets her new palms (how she could afford it, the state of public medecine, etc) that's a matter of what kind of society you're depicting.

Sorry, I meant to say hands. She looses hands. (Stupid language barrier) And it's only one example. I want my characters to lose limbs, get their skeletons crushed and flesh torn in pieces. Thing that would be hard or even impossible for medicine now. None of that "No serious wounds for heroes" nonsense.

And I want my story (and thus technology and sociaty) to be as close to reality as possible. It may seem silly, but I don't want to describe organ cloning as widespread if it's going to be outdone by 3D printing in Real Life.

I think limb/organ replacement would need to rely on a bunch of different technologies.

Like, first the blood vessels and the extracellular matrix would be 3d printed^note mirror image of the other hand?. That print would then be used as the support structure that the hand/organ would be grown on from cloned stem cells.

3d printers aren't Matter Replicators, they are printers. Analogy time... If you are going to print a bar of chocolate you need to print with chocolate, or possibly cocoa solids + cocoa butter and whatever else that is going to be in the bar.

Another one... no printer create the paper they are printing on or the ink/toner they print with.

edited 19th Apr '14 2:53:48 PM by m8e

Current thinking for organ cloning would be Bio-printing. You create a protein framework and inject stem cells into it. We've had some success for simple and low volume organs. Complex and large organs still require work but there is promise on that front.

Limbs are another matter. There's so many components (bone, muscle, nerves. etc) that have to be perfectly aligned that it might be easier to make a cybernetic limb.

A possible story-telling issue is recovery time. Even if a character can replace a body part with a new cloned/3d printed part, they'll still have had shock to deal with and they'll have to do a whole lot of motion therapy with the new limb. Stuff like organs and skin and such that's not such an issue, but they'll have to teach their new limbs to work, even if they're completely organic.

(Ah. Hands - that makes more sense. Prany, which language are you coming from, out of curiosity?)

Why does she need fleshy hands? Prosthetics are already quite advanced, and will probably be good enough to completely replace fleshy bits by that time period.

On the other hand, no matter what you or any of us say about it, writing the future tends to end up looking like Zeerust anyway. Especially that far out.

I really wouldn't worry about accuracy, and just go with what you can justify in-story. If limbs can be easily replaced, a number of injuries and diseases become very trivial. If you can completely replace a part of a body with a cloned one, for example, your readers will ask whether cancer still exists in that world and what the average life expectancy is. If they can be fully replaced with prosthetics, they ask why a human is being sent into such dangerous situations and not a robot that has all the agility and dexterity but none of the fear and ethical issues. If perfect copies can be built with 3D printing, why not gloves with layered kevlar and safety plates contoured in the fingers to avoid that sort of injury? And so on.

The specific solution really isn't going to matter as much as how well you integrate it into the society you're creating. And if the solution doesn't matter, then you can make one up.

(They can coexist, too. If organ/limb replacement is perfected, then the only reason to have a mechanical limb is because the user wanted one for some reason or another. If your character is in a dangerous line of work, replaceable mechanical limbs might just be more feasible either way. The original Robo Cop had a 400-pound hand grip, simply because the designers wanted him to.)

Latvian is my language.

(Would love to contribute more to the discussion, but in a hurry right now.)

At the current rate prosthetic limbs are improving and robots are being developed, I would expect that by the time your story is set robots would doing a lot of tasks that humans currently do and that fully cybernetic (functional feedback systems) prosthetic replacements are available at a reasonable cost with nano-surgery able to connect the parts to the nervous system.

There's no reason why cloning/3D printing wouldn't develop alongside the mechanical/electronic solutions and provide alternatives.

It's up to you how much they cost in-universe, so you could decide that either route is the cheaper option for someone who's not very financially stable.

You could decide, for example, that cybernetic artificial limbs are cheaper (artificial limbs have been around for a lot longer and have been refined and made cheaper over the years) and her having mechanical replacements (even ones that look highly advanced compared with what we have today) is a mark of a poor person while having more expensive cloned, grown or printed hands (that look and feel like the originals) is the mark of a rich person.

Or you could decide that due to the nature of cloning/growing/printing/whatever it's far cheaper than constructing a custom-sized mechanical hand and attaching it.