Giving Compass' Take:

• Matthew Shaer shares insights from his visits to the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine where research is moving toward printing human organs. 

• How can funders help to advance medical research? How can donors help to increase access to new medical technologies as they become available? 

• Read about the ethical issues surrounding emerging medical technologies. 

On the second floor of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, not far from the elevator bank, is a collection of faded prints depicting great moments in medical history. In one, an ancient Babylonian pharmacist holds aloft a vial of medicine. Another shows the Greek physician Hippocrates tending to a patient in the fifth century B.C. The prints were doled out to doctors half a century ago by the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis, which touted them as a historical highlight reel. But it’s not hard to read their presence at Wake Forest, home to perhaps the largest concentration of medical futurists on the planet, as the ultimate in-joke: Can you believe how far we’ve come?

A researcher named Young-Joon Seol met me at the door to a room marked “Bioprinting.” Young-Joon, tousled-haired and wearing plastic-framed eyeglasses, grew up in South Korea and trained in mechanical engineering at a university in Pohang. At Wake Forest, he is part of a group that works with the lab’s custom-built bioprinters, powerful machines that operate in much the same way as standard 3-D printers: An object is scanned or designed using modeling software. That data is then sent to the printer, which uses syringes to lay down successive coats of matter until a three-dimensional object emerges. Traditional 3-D printers tend to work in plastics or wax. “What’s different here,” Young-Joon said, nudging his eyeglasses up his nose, “is that we have the capability to print something that’s alive.”

He gestured at the machine to his right. It bore a passing resemblance to one of those claw games you find at highway rest stops. The frame was heavy metal, the walls transparent. Inside were six syringes arranged in a row. One held a biocompatible plastic that, when printed, would form the interlocking structure of a scaffold—the skeleton, essentially—of a printed human organ or body part. The others could be filled with a gel containing human cells or proteins to promote their growth.

Read the full article about printing human organs by Matthew Shaer at Smithsonian.