Strange Materials with Mark Miodownik

this is a 3d printer and it's key to what I've got to say today but for the moment it's going to pause it and we'll get back to it later the story I've got to tell today is about the difference between element matter and inanimate matter what is the difference is something I want to consider and how far can we go into walking into the territory of understanding element matter enough to replace our own body parts in fact to make ourselves live longer we'll get there via a 3d printer but before we do I just want to introduce a very beautiful demo this is a strange liquid and it just looks like some sort of oil well let me just take this around here so you can have a look at it and I picked up a magnet on my way now can you see that it's just a bit of oil but now it turns in something else something oddly kind of organic and if I take the magnet away again back to being just mundane black liquid and now it sort of becomes alive and you can you can do all sorts of things with it there's something strangely compelling about it it will yeah if you only try that but anyway yeah it's mysterious it it deserves an explanation and I hope to give you one and the explanation is about matter about what it is and how can it get it's marvelous properties it's a particularly good example of a marvelous wonderful property but actually the stuff around you all this stuff here is no less wonderful it's just that it's hard to understand the stuff because most of it is sort of just seems like white blobby red blobby stuff for metal blobby stuff and let's good idea apples water this is not mi understand okay so I want to just talk about what materials are for those here who are not used to thinking about them because that's totally fine I mean when we're young we put them in our mouths we kind of break them a lot and after that essentially we're done as materials aren't we but for the rest of us who are in material science we spend our whole lives thinking about them and this is essentially how we sort of think about them and it's it's not immediately intuitive way of thinking about the world which is that the world is of materials of stuff is has different scales to it and those scales are absolutely key to understanding how they work so this is a diagram it looks kind of complicated at the top you've got big things and as you go down the diagram you get smaller and smaller and smaller smaller and I've divided up into animal world over here but basically the way that we are built and of course at the top you have people and here we are we move around we have clothes on and like those guys but anyone going to fabrics is another story fashion here is the complete didn't work although anyway let's not go favorite fine and then of course there are big things that you kind of noticed as you get you know two organs and then organs are connected by pipes and you know tubes and things and then as you kind of get if you go down the scales you have things like tissues now tissues are made up of multicellular materials and if you look at those you find individual cells and here you can see some blood cells and these are kind of the these are kind of the Lego kit of the biological world and and everything you know we're we're made of cells all biological animate materials are made of cells and if you go inside the cells you get something that is as wonderful as a city and and as complicated as a city and then if you go right into the middle of those you get the nucleus get DNA and and the one willfully weapon with the animal material world is that if you change the DNA it is that you instantly change your eye color or you instantly get cancer it's that actually you change every single structure up the up this kind of nested structure of our materiality and and the same is the other way so if you suddenly start living in a desert your environment affects how your organs function it affects how they connect up it affects the sort of tissue that and it affects the genes that are turned on so there's a there's a there's a communication up and down the scales in your body you are a multi-dimensional living animate being its complexity neither if you were to point to where life is what is life well it's very hard to really identify what is life because any one of those scales is is to be understood completely by physics and that's where the animate at the inanimate side of this diagram starts to make some sense so you can take something like a robot or you know an iphone these are very complicated things they're very impressive things and as you go down the scales that make them work you can understand each individual part of it you can understand otherwise you can understand the tidal machines inside them you can understand the tidal crystal structures this little slab like thing on the right here is a transistor there's billions them in your mobile phone and billions in this computer and we get to the nano scale and we get to the atomic scale and each one of those scales we've started to understand we started to master and in fact the nano scale is the key to understanding this demo so the reason you can make a liquid behave magnetically and to be confined by my theta liquid is that tiny little manic magnetic particles over nano scale so small that they don't inhibit the fact that it's behaviors are liquid they're tiny tiny tiny things and they would normally get ripped out of the liquid by magnetic field because they're little tiny magnets but they've been engineered to have a layer on the outside of them which is sticks to the liquid so it's got a surfactant essentially and that means that it likes to be in the liquid more than that likes to be ripped out of them and so instead of being ripped out these little particles pull the liquid with them and so they mimic the way the magnetic field makes them makes them behave and they get completely confined by it and and so understanding the nano scale in this case makes you understand this demo but it also starts to make you realize that there's so much more you could do if you could do what nature does which is not just understand each individual scale and therefore make a computer or a robot or a mobile phone but actually what's to stop us crossing over this dividing line and replicating animate matter or replacing element matter and that's that's really what I want to talk about okay that's the introduction now I want to talk about this subject with regard to a very special person and that person is me no I'm joking no around Oh at me and I'm also going to white you I want I want to talk about our shared history and the kind of things that that material scientists in a sense have already done in trying to cross that boundary between the n element and the element and you might think well it's got nothing to do with me what's he talking about is he some sort of cyber person I've always suspected so he talks in this very strange way but no it's not that I think you'll recognize what I've got to say but before I do I just want to give you a bit of history which is that when I was a kid I had three brothers and we used to watch this TV program and those of you who haven't ever seen this intro to this program need to watch this and enjoy it those who have seen it just revel in that moment where you were at home watching the TV this TV series came on called the Six Million Dollar Man can you feel your heart beating faster yes this was just so exciting so the plot is that Lee Majors is an astronaut he has a terrible crash I can hardly contain my excitement this point but I'm sitting in my seat he's basically dead early alive that man better Rhonda faster and then we used to run round the house because this bit goes on for a bit and it hasn't started yet sit down sit down and we're really living it we're really living it and we believe that this is the future we believe that this is true and of course why wouldn't you and so let's see how far it was really true not long after I started watching that TV program I was getting some apples from the apple tree this is me up a tree and and I fell off broke my leg and I went I was taken to hospital and my brothers in the car Hojo 504 purple you know the three tears were all in the car shouting we can rebuild him better stronger faster and I was like not even in pain because I was like I ain't gonna be a bionic man and then we get to the hospital and I get seen by the doctor quite slowly actually and I say yo you broken your leg and and we're you know wait and I'm like well you're gonna rebuild me oh yeah yeah we're going to do is going to put some plaster around your leg and your body will rebuild itself that's real cop out yeah that's like that's budget cut sighs I'm not gonna be better I'm not gonna be fast I'll be less better and I'll be less fast which turned out to be the case but nevertheless it is the technology they employed is an ancient technology it was a first employed by the Egyptians with wax and honey and bandages and the Greeks and then that and then it was this breakthrough moment the Turkish realize that you could get a gypsum and you could put it around these fabrics and it would add water and you'd get this hardened plaster and actually if you just immobilize the leg itself then it actually will just heal itself the body is that clever and I am as you can say able to walk maybe not better faster stronger but I am able to walk and this is a real testament and before this time you know most the people who broke their legs like we know and we must have happened all the time that was it you were lame for life because most people didn't weren't able to sit still and have I can play completely immobilized for months that you required to do or this this material isn't really amazing because I could walk around and and and yet it would be remain rigid so although it was was you know perhaps of disappointing moment my life you know I started to believe that materials were important but this is just acting as a scaffold the next thing that happened was that I had many many encounters with different sticks and things usually with through my brothers and I also got stabbed which wasn't my brothers or at least that no he'll definitely wasn't them anyway but essentially I'm still you know able to get around now and that's because know if you stitch your stitch one together again will heal it so remarkable material skin and then I I had a really bad football injury and I broke my anterior cruciate ligament for those yes there's a few going and and when you can't what you really you really know that our life is just so much more difficult and in the end I had a replacement crucially when it put in which piece of my hamstring was taken out and two titanium screws to this date you can't see it but anyway are in there and they are basically allowing me to work you know walk run and most crucially ski - not a very high standard but at least I have a good time and again two times another you know who would have thought a screw would would be able to do that and a titanium screws seems like mundane object but it is one of the few metals that can survive in the body and probably will out you know well it will outlive me I mean it'll be you know as pristine as it went in and that that's a remarkable thing but last but not least this is probably any of you and that's happened to me about a few months ago again any of you who suddenly has a piercing pain in their mouth and realizes that something that's gone horribly wrong either you've got a cavity or something has chipped off your tooth you realize that our ancestors lived with to cake day-in day-out I mean for hundreds of thousands of years right and although they did try things like in fact in the end that they would try things like Gulf if you could afford it gold foil on top of the cavities of course they pulled the teeth out if they could but that was extraordinary painful no anesthetic and then they also tried pouring lead molten led into the cavities again it didn't work so well because it didn't bond the tool to the to the enamel or to the dentin so in the 1840s an amazing piece of material science comes along which is that you take mercury a liquid metal really a remarkable metal beautiful fantastic metal and the only liquid the only metal that's liquid at room temperature and then you and then what you do is you not any metal the only element there's liquid metal at one temperature okay just to stop the emails and and and you add small amounts of alloy silver copper zinc and what you get is you get a reaction between those metals and it will turn into another metal that's still ductile still hard but actually is solid and that reaction doesn't take very long takes about thirty seconds if you get it right and so that means you can make up something that's a liquid put it into the cavity and in about 30 seconds I'm it's it's hard and it's a solid and it will remain solid for the rest of your life and is very hard and very durable and without that material my god how much pain would we all have suffered over the years and I want to show you what it looks like I've got this little microscope here put oh now that is those that's not sticking to my my to that all that's actually it's only a mechanical pressure so you have to do an undercut in order to get it to stay that long in there and it and it and yes it is a remarkable tool and it and it doesn't leach out all those very well there's almost no evidence there leeches out even though it's it's mercury right an element known to be poisonous and highly toxic and so you know I've been a recipient of many dental implants now have them these polymer UV cured ones and also I've got a so Konya crown there that you don't see it anyway you probably want to say it but it really matches really well the other TS what I want to show you what anyway I'm not very good at so so it's not just it's not just it's not just that we've gained from a huge amount of you know reduction in pain but also you know a great aesthetics and therefore abilities yeah the other thing now last but not least the other by you know Bionic improvement I've had is is my glasses and without which I'm not really that much good to people and how many you know how many of us here you know rely on on these things to see and you know as you get older your vision gets worse really almost kind of without question and so you're thinking about a few hundred years ago most people after the age of 30 or 40 were essentially visually impaired by quite a quite chronic way and and so glass is the ability to see really you know it makes all the difference so I am I am essentially a Barnack a man not a very impressive one and not but I have been kind of enhanced by these different materials and glass and lenses are just another one that's that's kind of where I've come from and I'm sure a lot of you have some of the stories to those different implant a cl's glasses teeth implants and that sort of thing but where where are we going in the future what what is like to be available to us soon and I just want to sort of start talking about the kind of things that happen now which is that if your hip goes now you can have a replacement hip and it is a very effective treatment you can have a titanium implant which is tailored to your exact geometry and that's really important and is a very durable material but it is metal and the cut is usually sort of a polymer and these things don't last forever and so you know one hip goes in and maybe ten years later you guys have another hip go in and so on and so although these are very impressive implants into the body it's clear that what we really want to go to do when someone's hip goes is to rebuild that bone and the question is can we do it and it's funny because a material that is really just around the corner to allowing this to happen is been around since the 1960s and it was invented by a guy called Larry hench and what he did was he he saw he was at Vietnam and he saw how many amputations there were he really wanted to do something about it he started looking for materials that could be like bone and he started playing around with glass actually in different sorts of glass and he invented one which I'm just going to show you under the microscope here called bio glass okay here is and it's a very porous material and white and I know it doesn't look like a glass bit but it's a Morpha structure and and essentially is is it technically a glass and he found that something very remarkable at the properties of this material which is that if you implant this in to the body or if you put stem cells onto it those those stem cells they will develop into bone cells and in doing so they'll infiltrate the material and they will replace it with bone and it's kind of a miracle that this is possible and it's it's partly to do with the way that cells work cells don't like to sit on most surfaces they'd like to sit on the surfaces that they're used to sitting on that they've evolved to sit on or that yeah mostly those things and heaven and and and to find other surfaces that not only they like to sit on but actually will turn them into bone cells is really quite a remarkable thing so a long painless material called bio glass and it really opened up the idea that we could actually grow new bone within our bodies and that sooner or later we could regrow hips and regrow legs and arms and fingers by using this material now at the moment it's it's used quite a lot in a powdered form to cement different implants into the body and so on so it is already being used but it's quite hard to use it in a kind of monolithic form in a to replace a whole bone or a whole hip because actually when you put that in you then have to either completely immobilize the person because it's just not strong enough to withstand the the stresses that are put on it until the point is replaced which will take a few years so so trying to trying to bridge that gap is is obviously a big research goal but it has opened up an enormous set of possibilities for biomaterials as they're called and that's the one side for a minute because that then started another train of thought so it isn't just that bones are a chronic problem or in the joints but it's also things like the the bits between them so your cartilage and I don't know if anyone here is suffering from arthritis or a degradation of the cartilage but this is also a chronic problem and it's extremely painful and again here you have a material that's that's not a rigid material it's a very flexible material it's actually more like a jelly and I've got a bit of jelly here okay to show you that and jellies are really interesting materials because they kind of they sort of occupy this weird space between solids and liquids and obviously in the case of this jelly there is a lot of water in there but it doesn't this water is not sloshing around this water is somehow confined but there isn't an outer skin that's confining it it's an it's an inner structure of this jelly that's confining the water and that that inner structure is made of little fibers core of gelatine and these these are basically like a straw mesh inside this liquid and they're so they can find the water so well that it actually behaves like a solid and doesn't flow now cartilage isn't so different from that except that inside inside this kind of jelly like structure which has all these fibers that keep the whole thing in place but also give it that softness that flexibility inside them are living cells and those living cells you know are constantly gardening the structure and they're making it replacing the collagen which is that which is the reinforcing fiber and and that ecosystem within your cartilage is what gives you your flexibility of movement it gives you and the ease without paying because you've got these bones in your knees or your hips or your arms which need this cushioning so it's a brilliant material it's a fantastic material but once it's degree degraded once that ecosystem is lost it's very hard to get it back in fact it sort of irreparable and so what tends to happen is people get knee replacements but there are no where near up to up to the scratch so what what you'd like to do is cross this inanimate animal barrier and start to design gels that artificially have that ecosystem and then be able to implant them back into people's knees elbows and joint and therefore restore their mobility and defeat the arthritis and that sounds like science fiction but that is what a lot of people are working on now and it's very I can very confidently say that in you know 10 years time that that that is very like to be a mature technology which is offered to you medically because these things are now in kind of clinical test and what you see is what what the main problem is is is trying to get the cells inside these artificial polymer gels to live in a sort of ecosystem which they like and on this picture here you see these sort of pink cells living along or you know moving around in this kind of structure which is like sort of gel like structure and the question is can you get to the point where those cells start to replace the polymer with collagen and start to garden their own organic cartilage like material because once you've got that point then you've restored your cartilage altogether and that now looks like a very promising prospect and it all kind of boils down to understanding what environment cells like to be in and how they like to thrive and how they will build their own structures and this this whole area now is called material scaffolding so in a way you can think of your body your organs your your legs everything as these kind of these structures like houses you know they're very solid they're very dependable they have a particular structure but they didn't get that way they got that way by being built up through a through a with a scaffolding so that you know all the bits of it could be put together and then the scaffolding was taken away and there they are so this is the same idea the idea is that you will provide a scaffolding for these replacement bits of your body those the scaffolding will help them being built and then the scaffolding will dissolve away so what could you do with that well you think it's science fiction but here is there's a patient living today with with this technology in them and if this patient lives a long a happy life with this replacement then that really really will be the best evidence we've got that it's going to it's going to work for a lot of other things so this is a team from UCL who is a patient with a windpipe that was chronically damaged and if you have about the damaged windpipe things things are really difficult for you you're going to have to either breathe through a pipe in your neck and you're not going to talk or oil oil well all the problem is that you're going to die so it's a big problem I think you'll agree the idea is in fact what they did do is they created a scaffold right for for cells to grow to replace the windpipe they then infiltrated that scaffold in a what's called a bioreactor which is like a little house which mimics the kind of humidity and temperature of the body and they put cells from the patient in though in that scaffold and they started to build its own windpipe again and then they transplanted that into the patient and as I said this is this was done last year and you know everyone's crossing their fingers that this is going to be an important clinical test of you know a major part of the body that's been replaced by this technique now of course you can see immediately what the problem is that you might get this working for a year I mean then maybe the whole thing will fall apart maybe they won't get enough blood supply maybe they won't go to kind of really infiltrate into the rest of the body's systems but but this is this is you know this is a the best the best hope so far now what about alle bits of the body that you could replace this is another patient from last year who had a chronically diseased jaw and the lady was so old that it was going to be very difficult to do any other treatment other than trying to replace the jaw itself and so what they did is they did something really rather remarkable they they they took an MRI scan of her jaw they designed a replacement jaw and then they printed it off and this this is it okay this is a picture of the jaw that's printed energy is in the patient now and that that is really remarkable and that brings me to this this rather great object here which is a 3d printer by 3d systems and I'm just going to boot it up again and we've got it printing these hands sort of and it'll it'll start working a minute I want to give you a tour of kind of what 3d printing is because 3d printing is quite it's quite a it's a new technology and it's not something that everybody kind of immediately gets I'm just going to put a little camera on is it looking for me it's resuming its thinking it's tough it's it's good it's it's not easy to wake up I know that if anyone knows that I know that okay so here's my little camera so while it's waking up let me let me just take you on a little tour of it so it is remarkably simple so at the bottom here so in fact how am I saying let's let's hand out some of these printed parts it's the audience so that you can see the kind of thing I'm talking about so I want to you hand another one really beyond this knowledge do you want - yeah these are not gifts by the way this is so and well okay they'll go back you want oh you want the one I'm layin those case comings going I'm not going to throw it okay here we go we've met before Emily okay all right so okay so have a look at these when they come out now that they start life as a coil like this there's a polymer called PLA polylactic acid and this can be you know this can be obtained from you know vegetables and normal Gannett matter now here are the coils can you see them yeah I'm going to focus a bit better than that there we go okay all right now the hand that you've got around and this hand here started life as a 3d object in a computer and then was put on the disc and the disc is there and that was fed into this bit of electronics down here now what what it's being told is that there is this object and it's been divided up into little layers and when you see the hand coming around you'll see if you look very carefully at about a resolution of by 0.1 of a millimeter the hand has been slit as been basically sliced up into little layers so these layers are digitally exist in this computer here and it's going to try and turn this material into those layers it's going to print a layer then it moves as you can see here right it's printing one layer and then it moves this stage down and then we'll print the layer above now how does it control the stage well again this electronics here is controlling some motors as a motor there isn't it's not really obvious let me just pointed it sorry terrible camerawork there there's a motor there which is controlling the z-axis there's a motor there which is controlling the X&Y and you can see it's just rubber sort of gearing going on here which is moving it back and forth so these this bit of that joints down here is it's basically telling the printhead where to go on that one layer and printing out now how does it print well that's kind of remarkably simple to up here you can see something whirring and that's turning a bit of screw which is pushing a little bit of this material through into the nozzle below and the nozzle heated up and they say heat it up to twice the melting point of the material and that squirts it out onto the bits where it knows it should squirt it out and it doesn't squirt it out hopefully on the bit it shouldn't and then because it's twice the melting point of the material it heats the bit below which was printed let's say a minute before and and that allows the two to bond really well now let me just show you something else because it's kind of cool if I just pause it for a minute I know that's really unfair and take all right all right all right and take off this it's so beautifully simple you've got to see this because what's so great by the technology is you think it's high-tech it is kind of high-tech but it's also really low-tech which basically means it's going to be available to everybody every school every person potentially quite robust material as well so here we go that bit up there which was turning it's just turning a screw where is the screw there is the screw you see it and there is the material coming down being fed into it so the basic the screws turning and it's just pushing that's all that's pushing it down beautifully elegant design so if I now get it going again okay it'll take someone I'm you can see here fans and things like that which is cool cool the material once it's on it so in order to get that to sort of solidify and essentially that is it and yet you can print as you can see very complex looking things is a head of Walt Disney and so that's that's that is at a revolutionary object this is a revolutionary thing because good mm good timing and before I go on to that let me just show you that's hands as that we've got some other objects over here which mean Sinta visit with a 3d printer and I need the what's this called the visualize that yeah great I want to show you that you're looking at something that's sort of monolithic here is a piece of chain mail right with moving parts okay for that that was printed in one piece okay that that's is that that level of delicacy and the ability to have moving parts is already possible what's this I want in a minute as you zoom Xin okay this is printed in one piece with cogs alright these art is not assembled this is printed as this now you're wondering how it gets the dupe of bits in between it printed with a scaffold material in the middle so you can get the right gaps and then that scaffolding material is dissolved away in water but you start to see that this what appears to be a very straight for piece of technology can just do it's going to be disruptive it can change a lot of industries not just healthcare and I just want to show you one more this is from one of the latest 3d printers at UCL and the Bartlett this is a many material printer and you can see the kind of intricacy and the ability to change geometry and the image and the surface finish you can get and so this is many different polymers actually in this case so just to give you a flavor of the fact that we're talking about healthcare there is just you know there's you know you could print out potentially you know lots of the objects we have in our houses cutlery maybe you could make your own cutlery maybe you commit your own cups your glasses toothbrush your own phone cut you know this is all becoming potentially possible but but in that case you have to compete against industries that are making the same object like a pen let's say you want to make a pen well clearly this can make a pen you just need a thing that can make a tube and a printhead and then you need a something that can print the ink or at least deposit the ink it doesn't seem like it's going to be impossible right but you have to compete against industries who are putting who are printing mass-producing pens you know and and the question is economically will that ever be viable but in the case of healthcare what what this is this technology really wins out is that you you don't want a jawbone that's been printed mass-produced and then to your like your shoes right eight and a half yeah I just put up with it no I want the jewel for my jaw okay so this can do it right you do an MRI scan or a cat scan you get take that digital file and you print it out exactly and that's where it's really going to win big time and all right so here's a patient who's had a jawbone printed could you could you print could you print a liver could you put a kidney because those those are the areas which are really starting to become a huge demand the people I don't know if anyone here is is that on dialysis hat you know is waiting for a replacement organ of any kind it's extremely difficult for those patients that it's their only hope of a normal life if you get the transplant you have to wait four years and then you have to have immunosuppressant drugs which have other side effects and you have to hate them for the rest of your life and not probably if you're a young person you're going to have to have several transplants in your life it's a very very difficult road the black market has started up in those organs and at the moment don't have anyone knows the price of a kidney if you want to buy one from a bat market then one haven't want to get at a guess how much you could buy out an organ for if you were put where to go to if you wouldn't apply to the Middle East or India or China two thousand dollars yeah that's about roughly it yeah so I'm sorry you're sorry you will pay more than that that the person whose kidney will will be donated will probably get that amount money and they may not even get that money because two of you will have to meet in a hospital in the middle of nowhere and you'll never meet them and you'll receive their kidney or their liver and there's Ezio's is it's a very difficult business and and this is not going to go away people want lived longer lives they don't want to have to curtail the lives because they've lost their kidneys or livers and or had them you know forever reason so so the idea that you might be able to not just print a windpipe but you might be able to print a liver or kidney this is this isn't being taken very seriously now I say it's been taken seriously you know people are just rigging up printers and printing and it's not going to work that that approach is just definitely definitely not going to work for the reasons that we've already talked about which is that cells just don't like that kind of behavior and they'll probably all just die but people are printing cells now what you need to do of course is to create an environment which cells like to be in and then hopefully you're you've got a chance and although although is still early days for this thing a sort of mini industry is growing up because there is so much demand and because there is a tantalizing cost correlation between this technology and cell culture technology and stem cell technology and scaffolding technology in particular scaffolding technology so we talked about how brilliant bio glass is but that you know monolithically it's brittle and therefore you might have you know it's quite hard to replace large bones with it but what if you could create scaffolds that have a toughness and the strength that could last for longer than a few years enough time for your body to essentially grow their own bat then you might be printing it on this kind of machine right you might be printing the scaffold in exactly the shape and size that you need for your patient then doing exactly what they did with the windpipe which is infiltrating with stem cells from your from your from your your own body doing a bioreactor on it and then implanting it if you did all that there is a chance it's going to work and the Holy sort of Grail of this area is is a heart transplant because heart disease is you know rife you know heart transplant you only have one so it's even more critical and this is this is the state-of-the-art synthetic heart here and this is so this is this is what this is the alternative and so if you find yourself in this position you know you don't have that many choices you have to wait for a transplant heart you may not get one before dying you can put this synthetic version in and I think the record for someone living with one of these in is a year so it's really you know these things are being driven by people's you know by the fact that it's tantalizingly close and yet there's just huge amounts of science both from the material science point of view in the biology and the medics to do of course when you look at start looking at something like as complicated as a mechanical heart you know you bulk a bit you think cannot really be possible because now we've got something that's got a it's got an you know it's got to have really huge quite large stresses on it and and survive for a long period of time and if it stops then that's it so so you know there's the stakes are big so what is the future what you know what is the future this technology what is that our future will we be the bionic men and women of the future so I thought I just spend a few minutes kind of thinking about that because although what I've been talking about seems seems like sci-fi you know there are people and thousands of scientists and medics and material scientists and biologists working on these technologies and putting them into into into practice now this is a picture of my grandfather who died quite a long time ago too and this is with my mum who died unfortunately last year and you know these sort of things really remind you that over our mortality right they kind of make you think wow you know we've all got a limited lifespan but they also remind you something else my grandfather really shrank you know he was a big man and he got smaller and smaller and the question is will I will you will we be able to hope to be night he died when he was 96 well we hope to be able to be 96 mm and and be playing tennis going skiing because essentially although I talked about the life and death scenarios the truth is that actually the bigger the bigger desire for all of us is is a hat you know we probably don't want to live forever but what we do want to do is live a healthy life you know for a long time to be able to be to be mobile you know this is that too much to ask and I think that there will be an enormous demand for that and it sort of taking another tack you know the the technology around you know prosthetics has really come on quite a long way already you've got this material called carbon fiber which is extremely strong and light and stiff and this is this is made prosthetic limbs a lot more manageable and now they're being integrated with electronics so it can detect when you're about to take a step and it can just change it slightly the angle in which the foot hits the ground and all these things are slight improvements in making the gait look much more natural textiles are being developed and clothes that you can wear that they they start to monitor your health that they will if you if you need certain drugs they will be able to give you a drug through your skin and and also for people who are very ill and unable to talk it's often a big problem with to know exactly how they're feeling or what you know what's going on and so close that that sort of say let's say that a diabetic diabetic has got low blood sugar is you know these are these these sort of things are starting to become possible but one of the big big big big issues around all of these kind of questions is that you can talk about an organ because it's kind of thing and you get about heart or liver and you can imagine kind of making one until they're implanting it but then they have to be connected up to the system the system of your body this the thing that goes you know the to get the oxygen to get to get rid of the carbon dioxide to get the nutrients in to get the waste out and this this system is a very wonderful and connected system and this system is not something you can just take out and put another one in this is completely integral to you and so a big question is how to deal with that side of it running repairs wholesale removal certain bits of it possibilities another possibility and this is it sounds fantastic and I remember remember this movie I'm sure the Fantastic Voyage where you know you get this group of people who get shrunk down and they start traveling through a little spaceship through what submarine through your veins and and there's all sorts of shinee greed and betrayal anyway but people talk about nanotechnology they talk about it like it's going to be possibly like this that actually if you want to repair the network of blood or the network of capillaries that you're going to have to somehow send something through these capillaries to do running repairs or find places that are blocked and to repair them and and although this sounds really like science fiction it is actually happening there are several research groups that I know of who are developing things called nanoparticles which can be functionalized and that means that the tiny little particles so yeah it just like the nanoparticles in this which are you know you just wouldn't know they're in there there's a piece of liquid as far as you know there's nothing in there so that can run through your body no problem at all it's full of nanoparticles it can run through your body no time at all and there's the evidence of the nano particles now what if you could have a technology like that which only which basically ran through your blood but until it found something that one shouldn't be there and then it and then it kind of stuck to it and maybe made it break off or it kind of changed the chemistry a little bit which made it more brittle which meant it was washed away by the body those are kind of very passive ways of doing it but that technology of passive of functionalizing a nano particle that is here today that is really sophisticated soon you're going to see all sorts of blood testing which is really just about these nano particles you'll be able to put your blood into a solution which has got particular nanoparticles that are looking for a particular disease and they'll change color because of the way that there's nanoparticles will agglomerate and become a bigger particle and because they've become a big positive change the color the liquid that technology is already going to happen it's it's it's fully fully tested so nano particles and the idea that you will in a sense maybe repair your body from the inside is is something that I think is got what I can't really see any other way of doing it because I think that this network that that even if you get to the point where you can repairer or print a liver or print a kidney or even a heart you'll still got this problem that that your network of blood vessels is going to be 96 years old and that you know you really you really have to do something about that yeah which brings me to to to tony nicholson which is a very sad story of a man who went on holiday degrees with his family aged 55 i think and he woke up paralyzed from the neck down now this could happen to any of us you know this is just one of those things that can happen and he just couldn't cope with it I mean and his family talk very frankly and he talked very frankly about the fact that you know some people who this happens to they live full lives and they're different lies and they enjoy their kids you know development and they you know because they're completely sentient they're completely and utterly mentally active but he couldn't cope with it and he just wanted to die he wanted to be put to sleep and he of course the law in this country didn't and still doesn't allow it and so he campaigned for that ability and was in the end went to High Court and and lost and then he died last year now he basically had a nerve cord disorder and actually you know you can imagine that it is something we all kind of fear isn't it so paralysis at any stage of our lives and the idea that we might come up with some technologies that actually could go in and connect up nerve cords and reconnect them that that seems to me a very valid thing to do what we're talking about here is not about prolonging our life so we live 500 a thousand years of old what we're really talking about is a suite of technologies one of which is printing and the other is nanotechnology which which is about reducing these demons in our lives that you know the fate of going to Greece and waking up paralyzed those are things we most fear and those are things that I think are legitimate things that I think we could have a go at trying to solve and one of the one of the solutions probably is going to be a melding of electronics and humans and this is a piece of work from Brown University and this lady has got brain implants and what they do is they she thinks about certain actions and the computer records those actions and it translates it to some movement on a robotic arm and she can think that she wants a drink and the robotic arm she can control robot girl in order to drink and she's now as the years have gone I think it's the second year she's got more and more functionality so she so the ability just to you know to cross that boundary between the electronic world or the synthetic world and the biological world that is also coming on leaps and bounds and you know I think in some ways it will be a combination of these things that kind of extends our lives and kind of I very much doubt that we'll just be using the baldies own repair work but for the very reason that we are this sort of grown structure which is hard to it we're not a component built and so we'll have to sort of have ad hoc solutions to our problems and I think that sort of brings me to my sort of final that's a little bit early hey I'll spin this out a little bit don't know it all right wait what that's brilliant timing I got believe it let's have a hand or yeah oh there's been some problems but still it's still fairly impressive I have to say yeah that there it is that's very that is an extraordinary extraordinary thing is that you can just you know print out an object like that in a very short period of time I think that took a few hours to print okay so we took we started this thinking about this by separating the world into the inanimate world and the animal world and the animal world on this side it's not just that it you know so the physics is the same on both right let's say it could be that we found to be wrong but that seems the most likely thing that actually the physics everywhere is the same so what makes this alive on the on the element world is is I think that there is it's a multiscale structure which communicates up and down the scales and so when something happens at one of the scales the other scales can change accordingly they can react they can change the structure they can repair the structure that can grow another structure they can they can they can do any number of things and though that is a characteristic of life but that's not the only thing that's different on that side these structures here are grown these are grown from a single cell that's how nature builds stuff they built you you started from a single style but plant stars for instance are whale you know everything on this planet starts from a single cell and it's grown and that is a particular way of building things and it's a very different way of building things from from the human technology way of building things this this phone's computer this printer all built from components you can take them apart I took one of them out earlier bolts no nuts it's rubber and actually at a deeper level these others are all getting componentized so I talked about nanoparticles here they are but they are components right there can be added or removed a jelly we have gelatin we could add it to something we make a material we shape and that's a fundamentally different philosophy of making stuff it means that when you repair something you sort of take whole components out and you replace them you rip you rip a bath around so you rip a cupboard out and you replace it with new cupboards you you take a toilet out you have places you make a wooden bathroom for reasons that I have become a parent um but um so then the lengths our way of thinking about the body though is sort of very is you know is is I think subtly influenced by the way that we make things which is that we talk feel like we are bits of components and and and the fact that you know kidney transplants and liver transplants work at all is really kind of a miracle you know in a way right it's a really extraordinary that actually works you probably bet against it working but as we get to more sophisticated diseases and trying to they're about the connectivity of the body you know things about respiratory and blood diseases and about you know spinal cords and that is all that's all put in place very early on in development that's what's so brilliant about biology is what makes it so evolvable because small changes early on in the life of an organism can have huge changes in its in the way it functions in its structure and that means levers can be pulled and you can change you know you can build one thing one day build another thing another day with the same set of instructions and you know that that leads to evolve ability that leads to a world where yeah baldie doesn't design things to last forever it designs things to build there and a copy of themselves and there and that's how you get longevity and component construction is a completely completely different philosophy so so the question really does arise whether you know whether we should be sort of two questions here one is whether the sort of the fact that we've got these structures in us that were grown from when we were very you know a single cell to cells and embryo whether we can ever really hope to reverse time whether actually what we're doing is tinkering with something that fundamentally there's going to be a real limit to or or then we have to do the cyber option so we have to actually just wholesale plug ourselves in to different technologies this is the prosthetic limb thing this is the brain control thing and there's sort of two different futures for us or there's a synthetic future and there's a kind of using scaffolds and using 3d printers to just basically repair component repair our bodies and sort of almost two different human existences because because if you go down once and you got our set of people living to 150 by our computers and via pumps and vile prosthetics and you have another set of people who don't do that who are dying at the age of 80 90 because that's essentially when when the byways of your body essentially give up and it's very difficult to repair them well that mean of that back so that's that's going to be philosophically and ethically very difficult for us to handle on the other hand you have this component construction which we're kind of we've really shown how brilliant we are it I mean that the mobile phone is sort of the ultimate expression of it now we can talk to anywhere in the world any place anytime with this title object just in a what a triumph of component construction yeah biology you do that do you mean although pigeons can find their way how to do that but anyway but could it could it be that this is also kind of you know the weak this is also a sort of dead end that component construction has its limits and actually we should be mirroring biology and thinking about evolving like growing objects and and and as soon as you start think about that you come back to this readings because a guy called a John Byrne and bath University had the very same thought about this he saw this thing he thought you know what this gives birth to another object in this case a hand in that case a kind of funny thing with lots of but anyway eat what did it gave birth to a middle version of itself could that be possible and it's called he created this 3d printing called RepRap and what it does is it's it's made of components it can build itself which means that you could give it to someone and they could build another one from it and then they could give it someone else you could build another one from and now although it has its limitations at the moment because some of the key components are not able to be built likely electronics like the computational parts and some of the motors actually he's on to something really kind of fundamentally amazing which is that if we could get printers to print electronics and if we which i think is going to come and so you get to the point where you can build something as sophisticated as a phone so that you no longer buy a phone anymore you just buy the information to build a phone and you you print one out then then actually then actually you could actually change the whole way this world works it's really quite it's quite an amazing idea of a disruptive technology and and and so yeah it's a it is something really wonderful to behold here we are standing in front of this machine which which as I said before could could be a big part of our lives could be end up printing an organ for us at some point in the future and you know or or or or a leg even but but more than that you know that it could change the whole way that our sort of economy is operates and I know how we build things and I feel like while we're standing in the Faraday lecture theatre where Faraday you know gave his talks on evenings just like this 180 or years ago which is pretty amazing on a how to say and I think he was alive today he would have one of these I think I think he would be playing with his technology because I think it's got so much to offer and it's it's so fascinating and it and it really can take us in so many different avenues so yeah I give you the 3d printer and at home it wasn't the real Bell was it and was it it was a good and I thank you for listening you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 303,082

Rating: 4.6651239 out of 5

Keywords: Faraday, Ferrofluid, 3D, 3D Printer, Printing, Miodownik, Materials, Magnetism, Jelly, Ri, Royal Institution, Solids, 3D Printing, Chemistry, Science, Liquids, Lectures, Engineering, Teeth, Materials Science

Id: GEWFJiMK6CE

Length: 59min 23sec (3563 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2013