http://www.guardian.co.u...er-that-prints-out-drugs

Now imagine combining this technology with a sophisticated 3D printer. Wouldn't that be a Startrek like replicator? First, create all the right molecules in the right amount and then instruct the 3D printer to put the chemicals together.

I've been contemplating this for a few months now.
the problem with many reactions is it's not as simple as mixing chems together, the reaction conditions must be controlled, i.e. temp, inert atmosphere, etc.
a specialized device which controls these parameters would undoubtedly need to be developed, I'm sure it's in the works, and the technology will be bought by one of the corporate giants, like Thermo Fisher or Abbott.

Wow!! If I only had one of those in my house... Lol.

I would be the next Shulgin. Except without extreme chemistry knowledge.

Edit: (because I would be making psychedelics and trying them)

it's neither far-fetched nor surprising, really.
we live in an age of convenience, just about everything in industry
is automated. setting up a three-neck flask on a mantle is pretty antiquated, tbh.
a soxhlet is late 19th century technology. then again, so is the combustion engine

I don't think this is really "there" yet. Someone not very seasoned might think they are just printing out carbon bonds... Really what he is doing is printing reaction chambers, then basically throwing in reactants with a 3-D printer made microscale reaction vessel. Microscale as in, literally microliters. Honestly you might as well buy a test-tube, and throw the reactants in. They make no mention about side-products or work-up(very very few organic reactions give only one product). Good luck eating reaction soup lol. Maybe they will print out a chromatography column for you, and try to purify the compounds for you as well, then you'd just need some solvent cartridges and oh I don't know some kind of mass spectrometer or at least FT-ir spectrometer... oh wait now we're not talking $2000 USD for a 3-D printer we're looking more towards $5000(all used parts)-$200000....Good luck finding a cheap repair or troubleshooting that sort of thing lol. Isn't that basically what you went to school for benzyme?

Also this would be an awful replacement for the chemical industry. The current synthesis of their dream target(ibuprofen) is incredibly atom efficient(aka reducing some 10's of thousands of metric tons of waste a year then the previous synthesis whose patent ran up), whereas printing it out wouldn't be...

It would create large problems with chemical waste as well, which most people who own a computer aren't knowledgeable enough to really handle. Is it really practical to print out ibuprofen after buying a bunch of chemical precursor "inks", then go to a pharmacy down the road and purchase it likely for significantly cheaper using less energy and creating less waste? What about an error(how many times has your printer gone out of whack?), is a lay-men really smart enough to trouble shoot a synthesis(?), or a machine performing one. Would you really trust eating a chemical from a 3D-printer?

Basically this article says, "we did something really simple, albeit novel, maybe in the future it could be incredibly complex and perfect, but we have no idea how".

This is an incredibly limited paradigm, no stirring can be done, it relies on solvent flow mixing(pffft microscale reactions dreaming of preparative scale). Anyone who has ever done microscale knows that it doesn't scale well. If you have a headache do you want to evaporate 200mL of solvent(probably a fair amount more) and wait a few hours for a reaction for a 200mg tablet of ibuprofen? Or go to your cupboard or down the street.

Again how do you get inert atmosphere into a printed reactor? I guess flush the whole box, then you'd need an inert gas "ink" lol. How do you print heat, guess you could heat the "inks", but if you're doing that you really ought to have a bunch of thermostats and fail-safes?.

Don't get me wrong I hope people do work on this sort of thing but let's get real, it would be worse for the environment, incredibly expensive, less reliable, significantly less safe both in process and in product, and no one could put a gaurantee on it.

Just because you have a 3-D printer doesn't mean all of a sudden the laws of physics and how they apply to chemistry go out the window. We can move single atoms with tunneling electron microscopes, but that doesn't mean they bond when we move them like say two balls of play-dough do.... When fully automated reactors came out I doubt it made the news, http://syrris.com/batch-products/atlas-overview. How much do you think those cost ? That's what I'd invest in over a 3-D Drug Printer. Actually I wouldn't even invest in one of those, because I know how to put glass-together lol.

Three neck flask on a heating mantle is antiquated? Pshhhh. So many people use flasks and reactor flasks every day globally its not even funny. Process chemistry doesn't start on the 2,000L scale. Not all fine-chemicals are made on the industrial scale, I'd venture to say most(in quantity not most frequently used) do not. Take a peak at this companies pilot scale, then their kilo-scale, all in 3-neck flasks(http://www.registech.com/regis-facility-tour)... Surely their 500 gallon scale isn't.

so many people use those apparati because they're cheap.
for production scale, they're archaic. this is what engineers address everyday, finding more practical, automated solutions to old
problems. creating a printer with the same design as a fume hood (gas inlets) which is climate-controlled
seems reasonable for industrial applications

you may also want to check out LabVIEW. it takes a lot of the guesswork out
of lab automation.

I'm ready. Even though I'm covered, my meds cost hundreds each month - prescribed meds. It would be so cool, if I could just print my own.

And Nemo Amicus asks, "How far away are we from printing me a new body?"

What I'm trying to say is this. I see absolutely no advantage to using a 3-D printer over an automated reactor. Only hindrances. For processes where it may be possible to use the printer it could be done more economically(but even still more expensive then buying the compounds themselves made on a large industrial scale IE ibuprofen) on a test tube scale. The ingenuity of the article is printing out a micro-reactor, though I'd hardly call it ground-breaking. The idea of stream-lining automated organic synthesis at residences for lay-mens is a long while away, no matter how much hand-waving is done.

Why use a printer to dispense reagents over a peristaltic or syringe pump? Why purge a 3-D printer with argon rather then a flask? There is absolutely no benefit to using a 3-D printer over a flask let alone a traditional automated system...

Also a small number of "inks" to make any compound. Hah, yeaaaa... Unless he's found a way to turn tomes of organic chemistry into a few paragraphs... It's all hype. Not even dreaming, hype.

well, given the direction of nanotech in general (google: lab-on-a-chip),
i still think this isn't far-fetched nor impractical at all. these printers are already
used to make polymers products, very efficiently

and yea... i did method development in microfluidics.

Wouldn't that be cool. Just have a chemical printer to print your meds! Hahaha.

The inherant flaw in this Pandora is that even if a 3-D printer printed Nemo a new body, you would still need a surgeon actually a team of them to put him back together.

Benzyme I really haven't seen any counter-claim to any of the points I've brought up. Infact one of the commenters on a highly acclaimed organic synthesis blog "In The Pipe-line"
(http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/07/23/science_fiction_gets_the_upper_hand.php if you took the time to read the news article you should also take the time to read the 4 paragraphs on this blog from a man who knows organic synthesis intimately...) under the article titled "Science fiction gets the upper hand",

a poster has said that his professor, Cronin,(the guy the article features) says...


another commenter says: .


So is it far-fetched? COMPLETELY. Sure in the future anything is possible but at this point looking at this is on the same scale as saying in the 1950's by 1980 we'll have hover boards and live in geodesic domes.


Scientists don't complain when people discover new things, they tend to rejoice. They are critical of out-landish claims because they spread like a bad virus. If I had a penny for every-time someone has claimed that things like free-energy are being repressed, or an out-landish pharmaceutical conspiracy I'd be wealthier then Gates. This kind of fantastical claim leads to the undiscerning public to feel cheated when reality doesn't meet expectations from knowledgeable experts. That's my gripe.

I made a perfectly good counter-point: lab-on-a-chip.

Ten years ago, people were saying the same thing "it's science-fiction, improbable, blah blah.."
what was considered science-fiction then, is being realized and designed today.
the problem is organic chemists continue to hold on to their traditional tools and romanticize the days of bunsen burners and retorts. technology is advancing much more rapidly than we saw coming ten years ago.
don't be surprised if these printers start printing graphene objects in the next couple of years.

Nature will give you a new body in about 7 years if you consider the age of the actual cells in your body. As far as printing one?? I don't know, but that sounds pretty bad ass.


Friends call you up like "lets play some bball!" and your just like "hang tight mi amigo's, I just have to print out a new body and download my consciousness real quick. Bodies are open source now so i think i'll print a Michael Jordan model this time. Forgive me but i just don't think this willie nelson is going to do me much good in a sporting event" lol.

Lab on a chip doesn't really mean much. From an efficiency and preparitive scale(which a dosage of a drug must be) they don't always compare. A whole new process would need to be developed to make a target, and each target requiring different specific reactors(making these isn't exactly like putting legos together even if a 3-D printer makes it for you). If you want a mg of a compound with a few simple reactions and have $50,000 for the equipment that goes with the micro-reactor sure it's a nice tool. Pharmacuetical industries do use techniques similar to this.

Probably the cheapest and simplest micro reactor equipment(new) runs about $25,000 currently
http://www.sigmaaldrich....79?lang=en&region=US

More adequately one should be ready to fork over $100,000 to $150,000
http://syrris.com/flow-p...ucts/asia-flow-chemistry

That's the detail people leave out when they show you a lab on a chip...Now I know 3-D printers are high-tech and great but I don't see them replacing these just yet... At least not cheaply.

Graphene objects sound possible, I wouldn't reject that.

Let's talk ibuprofen...

The original industrial synthesis(the cheapest way possible at its time) was done and patented by 'boots'

Could this be done via maybe 7-8 micro-reactors(if the silicone material could even handle the reagents involved...)? There are advantages in some cases to batch scale microscale reactors sure, but how that is incorporated with a 3-D printer? Maybe a little evidence would help. The most note-able thing I have seen was a knoevengal condensation reaction on an analysis scale(lab on a chip techniques), then again I'd seen a similar reaction done by grinding lithium hydroxide with the solid materials using a mortar and pestle on a significantly larger scale with better yields and faster reaction times at room temperature without solvent...

Now lets go to the modern synthesis that replaced the original because it has 77%-99% atom efficiency almost waste nuetral. Aka, as I said above reduced 10's of thousands of Metric Tons of waste the original synthesis made(Boots).

Oops it uses HF, bye bye 3-D printer probe, reaction chamber, you get the picture... Then a hydrogenation, wow can't imagine that being done on a lab on a chip, and if they put the catalyst in the walls of the micro-reactor(as they say is an advantage...) it couldn't be regenerated by any casual means(expensive waste and now the reactor needs to be replaced frequently...). Oh crap then a palladium catalyzed reaction requiring carbon dioxide gas(pretty certain this is done at a high temperature but I am speculating). Well it's intuitively obvious a micro-reactor is not ideal for such a process, or the boots method.


I don't think it's organic chemists are stuck in the past, I'm pretty sure they use flasks for a reason. Would you rather maintain 5 micro reactor processes to run a reaction in parallel($1,000,000 in equipment alone), or have 5 flasks and glass-ware for about hmm $500? Now to expect a 3-D printer to operate on this scale well, it again is an outlandish claim. Where's the evidence?

Again analysis is needed for drugs because one malfunction in the process and well you don't have what you want at all. Like I said before tack on another exorberant amount of money for that equipment. Stream line all of this equipment to work on it's own so that a lay-men can print this out(now the equipment would likely take up the size of a bed-room) using soft-ware and data acquisition techniques that currently do not exist. As there are thousands of people whose job it is to monitor industrial or research and development processes after-all you know what say an analytical chemist, environmental chemist, industrial chemist, etc do...

How regulated are things like tylenol after-all? Ridiculously regulated. The whole FDA and legal system would have to change. Drug patents would need to be changed, etc. Societal issues would be at the very least, massive...

It's just not there yet, and it certainly won't fit on a desk, nor be with-in any normal persons budget, and the government wouldn't support it(likely). It won't be for a long time either, even with moore's law.

moore's law will be moot within the next decade, with the dawn of photon-processing and quantum storage (more sci-fi dev in the works). the cost-problem, I wasn't disputing, obviously people still use flasks because they're cheap. it wouldn't be hard to miniaturize PTFE lines for handling things like HF.
obviously, with any new tech, initial costs will be high; but when mass production is streamlined and patents expire, these technologies break into the mainstream. nanotech is really reshaping entire industries, it seems like its occurring much more quickly than in the 00's

from what I see, these printers can be tailored to niche markets. the technology can be developed for specific purposes, not necessarily an all-in-one printer. for now, its obvious application is CAD fabrication.

For one, you would have to trust the chemistry and intellect of the machine creating your "fate" almost.

Let me know when it works though ;]

I agree with that, its just a long long way away to even produce say ibuprofen(if it were even practical), let alone anything complex. Hard to imagine a million liters of precursors and 3-D printers and all that equipment in homes being more advantageous to society then one plant per country. In theory though it would be cool if it were a flawless machine though as it would remove the need for regulations.

Like I said before, we expected to be hovering on hover boards decades ago. Well we do now have hover boards but they require ridiculous amounts of magnets and liquid nitrogen to work, ie, still not practical. Maybe in 30-40 years though. Hopefully sooner but there needs to be a realistic assessment done based on current understanding. I wouldn't deny the potential of the future but I'm not willing to give up all of the steps to get there based on a dream.

I was just offended that someone would publicly display that something that I am learning and will be learning for the next series of decades would be readily replaced by a non-existent technology using non-existant foundations in one mans life-time. Had to put my foot in the ground and not a hand over my mouth.

organic synthetic chemists will always be needed...especially with graphene and nanotube tech? c'mon.
the automation will not replace the knowledge base and skillset you acquire; you may end up fabricating the materials for the tooling of the automation, or be involved with the R&D. it will all be lucrative and stable work.

Nemo Amicus sat on a lifestyle Cancer Wall.

Nemo Amicus had a great undifferentiated metastatic tumor fall.

All the County Hospital Personnel and all the Hospital machines

Couldn't put him back to health again.

Well drat!

Next up chemo and radiation.

Keep the technology updates coming bros!