Now, I have a soft spot for futurism and wild scientific speculation, but what caught my attention was how Cronin and his team have begun printing complex chemical molecules using an open source 3D Printer.
From the Guardian, “Cronin's team discovered that it could use a bathroom sealant as a material to print reaction chambers of precisely specified dimensions... After the bespoke miniature lab had set hard, the printer could then inject the system reactants, or 'chemical inks', to create sequenced reactions.”
Central to the success of this technology is the ability to create accurate reaction chambers. Because the chemical inks flow through the chambers in a linear fashion, the negative space in the chamber acts as a chemical sequencer.
In the future, more complex reaction chambers could be manufactured where multiple reactants could be injected simultaneously from predefined entry ways allowing a greater amount of chemical to be created.
Cronin isn’t shy about expressing some of the intentions of his project stating, “What Apple did for music, I'd like to do for the discovery and distribution of prescription drugs."
Now, I’m not so sure about having an “App Store” for at-home pharmaceutical compounding… How would a system like that be regulated? Who would distribute the base materials? The list of questions goes on and on.
All of that withstanding, I still think Cronin’s work is amazing. In my opinion, one of the most fascinating aspects of this project is how it takes the complex and amorphous scenarios that play out in chemical reactions and defines them in terms of linear progression.
Read the entire article at The Guardian
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