This “op ed” and the letters are an absolute riot! I laughed my head off almost to delirium! Oops! I need to take the rental bioprinter back before I am sent to the mentally tormenting AI machines as punishment.
I am going to bioprint sentient, self-rooting hair for my bald pate! Jim Morrison locks, here I come! Fran Wilde, you gave me a great idea. What could possibly go wrong?
1
The Oddity, the Ill-e-Add, the unicorny loose caboose of the bespectacled smarty mind.
1
Why can’t I find any mention the Chicago traffic jam and these unicorns in Chicago news? Or any news? Was this reported anywhere?
I thought that this piece, even though it's not Arthur C. Clarke, was quite thought-provoking and amusing, although I felt a little guilty about laughing at some silly objections that could easily have been controlled by proper education of both children and adults.
First off, let me admit I was totally unaware of this series and admit I wasthe one who lost. But now I can perhaps remedy that.
Now, I am totally supportive of prospective and imaginative reporting and I want to stress that we must constantly be on guard from the cortage of Ayn Rand followers who persist in persuading our youth in vulnerable stages, and some never recover.
2
I have bioprinted a male and female of a new sentient species, an apple tree, and a serpent. Everything seems to be fine at present, but somehow I feel there is a potential for things to go wrong.
10
"Environmental quandrycist" - love it!
2
There’s no documentation that helps me in the User Manual, but I apparently bioprinted a Tribble a little TOO well. Any tips from fellow bioprinter owners? They’ve taken over half my apartment.
23
Bioprinting is a double-edged sword. He and his friends printed dragons when they were 8 years old, and tried to fly them off the roof of the house. They had downloaded some plans, but they didn't know how to test them, and the physical and behavioral specs were not capable of flight.
We recycled the dragons, but without bioprinting, none of the boys would be able to have anything like normal lives today; the doctors were able to replace limbs and internal organs. Now my son wants to grow up to be a doctor, and if I don't let him play with the bioprinter, he'll be too far behind his peers to get into a good school.
73
Wait, these things are like "$2,000," and there are people who let "children" play with them? And you think you're going to tell THEM what to do?
OH MAN!
1
I thought my 5-year-old daughter’s bioprinted unicorns were a problem ... until my 8-year-old boy started bioprinting blue hedgehogs, all named “Sonic.” I don’t know if I’ll have enough chilidogs to feed them all!
5
If this were written as far in the future as it claims, it would really be written in Chinese or Spanish.
12
I love it! Harpys created by high school students reading The Odyssey cause havoc at sea!
And now for the havoc of cyclops on the football fields and the enchantresses of Circe walking the hallways of Everytown University turning male chauvinists into the pigs they are at heart.
1
Also, enough with the 9 foot tall mid-80s era Samantha Fox clones. The first couple were fun but now who's going to feed them all?
2
I want to see this as a live newscast!
2
Unicorns are NOT big white stallions with a narwhal horn stuck on their foreheads! The mythical unicorn is small as a deer or goat, has a tail like a lion, cloven hooves, and a beard like a goat. Look at authentic images of mythical unicorns at the Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Or Musee de Cluny in Paris. Not Disneyesque travesties.
3
Is this what Romney meant when he said he had binders full of women?
8
I don't think Harpies are in Odyssey. They appear in Aeneid.
Flipping BRILLIANT!
3
If those libs at the national assembly hadn't banned the printing of all types of guns we could have shot those unicorns like the sitting ducks they pretended to be. Of course, I would have the guns loaded with tranquilizer bullets, not the lethal ones properly banned decades ago.
5
It might be time to rescind the 37th Amendment. There is no reason the general should be able to get their hands on a bioprinter so easily. At a minimum, there should be strict background checks before purchasing a bioprinter.
3
This, too, is a work of fiction.
Dear Fran,
Have you checked your grandmother’s space pod recently? My mother pointed out that her mother was one of those in the early 2020’s who bought the Unicorn software. By that time most of us already had printed unicorns, Star Wars XIII characters, and LEGO sets. Heck! I got a complete Corning Ware plasti-boro-ceramide kitchen set when I got married.
I have a complete set of FantaCee Creations if you ever need them.
Always a fan,
Europa Fixonalia
2
What exactly is the problem with printing livers to grill and eat? Seems pretty win-win to me, and cruelty-free! We need to give people access to good protein and make sure nobody ever tries to eat the unicorns.
37
@Samuel Russell One supposes that the author may have declined for decency's sake to point out precisely which species of liver was being printed.
4
@Samuel Russell
They were human kidneys and livers. Cultural diversity aside (see Papua New Guinea) , cannibalism among the economic elites is still considered tasteless.
4
@Samuel Russell I took it to mean that they were human livers and kidneys...
1
“The Odyssey.” The harpies were so well designed...
I think this should read "sirens" instead of "harpies."
6
Personally, I'm willing to put up with a few unicorn traffic jams. My bioprinted kids are the envy of the neighborhood.
14
You just printed a riot :)
1
This reader fondly remembers some sixty years ago receiving in the mail a wax paper package filled with a fine powder that when mixed into a glass of water brought hundreds of microscopic sea horses fantastically to vibrant life; just as advertised in the back pages of a comic book.
8
Great stories. I've been dissatisfied with the NYT news lately and this series revived my interest in reading the paper.
3
Fantastic way to get out of our daily milieu and better understand what we are creating in this voyeurtainment culture. I once proposed a project for my church Climate Collapse class, for each of us to write personal letters to our descendants living in 2050, giving them names, and explain to them why we had done what we had done to Earth and ourselves. It was very revealing. We also concluded that homo sapiens are a host-destroying viral species that perhaps does not warrant survival.
4
See 'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus' Mary Shelley
An insightful magnificent powerful staging of this saga is currently being performed in Chicago at the Lookingglass Theater Company. The Court Theater in Chicago also did a stunning interpretation.
Our scientific and technological prowess often exceeds our legal, moral, political and socioeconomic ability to effectively and timely assess and weigh relative human societal costs and benefits.
3
I didn't know whether to laugh out loud reading this or to nod continuously in agreement. So, of course, I did both!
Bonus word of the day: "quandrycist"
6
“Fisher Price Waterhouse” was a clever and funny aside, and made me chuckle.
18
Ditto!
2
I think the Dems should outlaw bio-printers once they regain power as the problems identified in this piece will pale in comparison to a future DJT wannabee bio-printing a whole bunch (3 million?) of Trumpistas who would surely be entitled to the vote since the current Trumpistas (sadly) are.
7
Remember when our grandparents regretted--and bemoaned--unintended consequences? Such as mass extinctions resulting from climate warming? Well, now we have biodiversity beyond imagination.
What's the opposite of "mass extinction"? We'll call it "thundering speciation". Now, that's a future we can welcome. With Darwinian selection controlling the effects of fecundity, we won't even need sex education in preschools anymore.
5
The great bioprinter that we call the life force started out with a kind of green crud floating on the waves and capped it all off by printing about seven billion somewhat vicious creatures who haven’t got the good sense to run a planet and are now intensively involved in destroying whatever potential the Earth has to support life. No doubt it has been an entertaining sideshow but in a universe deeply involved in manufacturing more important things like black holes life has lost its entertainment value .
9
what a great essay!
thank you so much
3
Wow what a time to run such a series, when the media can't be trusted and allegations of "fake news" fly freely. Does not seem like a well-thought out idea since inevitably the fine print will be lost on some/many readers.
1
When laws worldwide get to be made on replicating humans with bioprinters I hope they look at who was President in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020 (possibly 2024, ouch) and write the laws accordingly. If they want more examples they should look at political leaders in Russia, China, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Philippines and quite possibly Austria and Italy...we don't want a gift that keeps on giving.
1
Quite right, too -- bioprinters are much too dangerous for kids to use.
But I can still keep my genetically customized dodo, right?
5
@MockingbirdGirl Oh! Oh! I want a Dodo too!
2
Cloying and elitist. Another reason to call for a social revolution is to equalize access to technology like this and not concentrate it in the hands of a few privileged brats...
3
Thanks for spelling "free rein" correctly (no "g"). Seems nobody knows the difference any more. Maybe if every kid had a bioprinted pony they'd know what reins are!
I don't believe that a mere 27 years from now people will understand DNA well enough to design a viable biome for a hitherto-nonexistent species.
3
Without even reading most of it, the article reminded me of a chilling George Saunders short story, "The Semplica Girl Diaries".
1
Sounds like the cat's out of the bag... err, printer. And I hear the real problem is in the adult entertainment industry....
5
Bio-printers: The perfect hate gift of the future for relatives and frenemies you could do without.
1
I want to know who printed the mini uni? Were they searched for and arrested? Will there be a trial? All questions I want answers too. Too funny.
I can almost picture 1,000 of the little darlings running amok!
3
We need to reassess our time framework. “Bioprinters, or, as they were once known, 3D organic bioprinting machines, have a long history”. And how long is the history? All the way back to 2012.
2
Marvelous. What an imaginative hoot.
3
I’m going to start a program in quandary studies at my local university right now. First assignment, “I’ve paid my tuition (with loans), but I’m probably wasting my time. Should I stay?” Discuss among yourselves.
6
Fran Wilde is clearly an optimist. What makes you think the world will be habitable enough for human children to play with bio-engineering by the time we can playfully reflect on 2047? Not that I don't appreciate science fiction in the Utopian mold. However, we need to be realistic here. Our children are much more likely to witness mass extinctions, drought, and chronic food scarcity than print-the-cow-who says-moo.
Not exactly the zombie apocalypse but that's what climate change will do. The fanciful creatures children are likely to create will probably more closely resemble polar bears and elephants than dinosaurs. Just saying.
@Andy
In the world I saw in my head, polar bears and elephants were passé and living out a peaceful existence in a bioprinted atmosphere where they have everything they need to thrive...within pre-ordained limits. But just the sight of them brings us comfort.
Dinosaurs were fun, for awhile, but they destroyed too many decorative flora and fauna, in-ground pools, favorite pets and transportation pods to keep them around so their production was banned and they were allowed to age out or be selectively hunted for big profits by the spawn of politicians high on a bio-printed form of adderall that kept them totally functioning until they simply dropped dead in their mid to late 30's.
Traffic snarling unicorns were the natural progression of bio-entities that pulled us back from extinction. Co2 consuming microbes, self regenerating corals, old stock trees that grew like amaryllis and didn't have seasons but did have staying power. And we loved them so much for doing that that we let that "savior strain" progress to the magical realm and, once again, fanciful rather than practical thinking is threatening to destroy life as we know it.
3
I think it’s fine, as long as they’re wearing their helmets.
3
Oh, I don't know.
Those electric eels I bio-printed to stock the algae moat around my house do seem to keep the neighbors at arm's length, though they tend to choke on the plant mat fairly rapidly and then you have to make more. And I've rustled up a batch of pterodactyls to discourage any approach from above--they even keep most of the drones away.
In the meantime, I can sit in my media chair with my brain implant and listen to Beyonce's fourth clone sing endless choruses of Single Ladies, only getting up to occasionally bio-replicate a few more chicken nuggets. They don't taste quite as good as the "real" ones I remember from my youth--admittedly, those didn't have much flavor either--but you can't be choosy in this day and age--and replicating actual chickens and preparing them would just draw more of those protesters who are hard to distinguish from the neighbors.
13
I can't wait for the kid-friendly bio-printers. As a grandparent I feel it my duty to give my grandchildren everything their parents abhor.
My daughter is completely against them. She thinks children should use their imagination. She wants her children to read! Can you imagine? In this day and age?
I ask myself constantly where I went wrong.
All of my grand children will get bio printers for their birthdays's this year.
And as soon as the party is over, I'll send them home.
17
"Busy commuters had to take over the driving of their autonomous vehicles"
I am now teaching two boys to drive.
Commuters used to autonomous vehicles won't be able to take over. They won't know how to drive.
These are the sorts of detail that cloud our view of the future. Yet I still love these explorations.
12
The climate changed. There is nothing in the fields or on the store shelves. Our bioprinter is the only way to keep our children from starving. We have to keep it hidden in our underground shelter. I think the neighbors suspect we have one. I caught one of them peering in our window. It’s only a matter of time before...
20
Somehow it seems rather implausible that there will still be strip malls that far in the future....
6
My bioprinter worked great until I ran out of bioink and found that it costs nearly half the price of the printer for replacement cartridges. I tried refilling with off-brand ink, but then I got copies of narwhals instead of unicorns.
107
😂
Imagine when Mos Eisley gets into the market of off-brand ink cartridges.
2
Sigh. Even in the future, all the groundbreaking scientists are men.
51
@Daniela Smith
The scientists mentioned in the article (Yamanaka, Gurdon, Atala) are all real people who have worked on the things listed. (Women are also presently welcome to make scientific breakthroughs.)
4
@Daniela Smith None of the future scientists were named, only present/past ones.
4
@Henry
Apparently women are allowed to make scientific discoveries, but not to get credit for it.
https://listverse.com/2013/10/14/10-groundbreaking-women-scientists-written-off-by-history/
5
If you can create life does that make you a God? Does it give you complete license and control over it? People are inherently wicked and cruel anyway. We've never needed a reason to cage/chain/leash/abuse an animal and it's always been that way and I see no sign of abatement amongst our atavistic species.
The only thing that makes people better is control and discipline. If people won't behave on their own they must be made to behave - for the betterment of all life. Perhaps instead of looking to the future we should be looking to the past for inspiration. I think Dickens had the right of it in Oliver Twist. Nothing puts a person onto the right path like regular beatings and gruel.
3
If any of the kids in my son's class have one, I have the right to get one for him too. I worked hard to get him in the right pre-school, the right kindergarten, and I won't stand by and watch his future as a doctor fade away just because this writer doesn't like unicorns!
30
Fun! Looking forward to the rest of the series.
15
Westworld, here we come. Funny and scary at the same time. And if we're still here, it will happen. Thanks for putting a smile on my face.
14
Brilliant! A tasty balance of geekiness and social commentary.
25
"It took the Chicago police nearly fourteen hours to clear up the resulting traffic snarls." At least the CPD no longer shoots first!
28
Noah's Lark could get very crowded. Human consciousness hibernating in fantasy dream state until ... until ...
7
I, for one, am appalled that the NYT would publish such a moralistic op-ed. Social science has shown us that a hands-on approach to learning is the most effective, and there's nothing more hands-on than slapping a unicorn repeatedly across the face to ensure their pain receptors are working properly.
How else am I to teach my son and daughter about science? Books?! I suppose Wilde also wants us to do away with our neural-digital-interface implants!
Wilde would have us thrown back into the dark ages.
48
Definitely bioprinting will bring a lot of ethics questions along with it. I'm surprised that this article didn't go into the more pressing question of a more obvious use of this technology. As soon as bioprinting becomes generally available, people will use it to craft human slaves. This is just an obvious demand of a large swath of society, as is clear from the sales of Alexa and other robot slaves, and animated sex toys attempting to replicate prostitutes.
So, crafting fantasy animals will be pretty bad, but it's going to be more of a dilemma once people start replicating humans.
13
@Dan Stackhouse
Or, much more likely much sooner, printing custom-made bio-warfare strains. That was what I expected the article to be about, as an ethicist working on human enhancement having perused where "bioprinters" might go in the near to far future. How do you stop a device that can print organic material in configurations that allow the material to emerge 'alive' from being used to make germ warfare agents? Could manufacturers lock out all possible terrorist applications?
But maybe that will be figured out... although I imagine this article avoids 'human slaves' as you suggest with the thought that printing fully functional synthetic human brains would be too complex for this level of the technology. Time will tell.
13
But Stackhouse, what race will they resemble?
2
@Dan Stackhouse I want to use it to print VOTERS! Lots and lots of Democratic VOTERS! Of course, they will have to be independent enough to travel to and establish residency in swing states...
11
Great, NOW sales are going to go through the roof.
Where can I get, uh, THREE?
16
Unicorns in general -- also mermaids and squishy cupcakes -- have gone too far. Kids are covered in sequins and confused about what's real. This could reflect parents' reluctance to let the kids know what's in store. How about teaching kids to make things with their own hands? fix things? the disposable economy is failing....
19
Cute story to kill time but let’s get realistic. The population of this planet isn’t slowing down one iota, polar caps melting and that carbon in the atmosphere that is doing so much damage is dwarfed by our oceans who bear the brunt of this carbon explosion. The oceans are dying there is no stopping that. All the bio printers of the world are not going to fix that.
13
@Ted Siebert
Well, what if bioprinters are used to help replace rainforest flora we're hearing so much about right now? I.e., helps us shore up carbon-storing organisms as the carbon content grows?
Perhaps the resources to run the printers would always produce more carbon than anything they output. But maybe this could be one tiny part of many other mechanisms of a solution?
16
@Ted Siebert Well, if it's that bad, then the game is already over. Can I do a unicorn in blue?
3
I completely disagree with this. I am a parent of two beautiful daughters who have bioprinted an entire menagerie of miniature unicorns, hippogriffs, mandrakes, and all kinds of chimeras, and playing with them is by far their favorite activity. As long as parents supervise their children and ensure that all the bioprinted pets are properly caged and fed, there are no moral issues here.
81
I wholeheartedly agree.
1
It’s all fun and games until someone bioprints airborn VD...
4
If this is a glimpse into the future, I'm glad that I won't be around to see it. I grew up reading Arthur C. Clarke, Issac Asimov, and others in the genre, and was thrilled by the possibilities they espoused. However, I have come to realize that I'm a person of my time. I don't long to be young again. I made too many mistakes back then, and am happy to have survived all of that, perhaps even becoming a little wiser in the process. With any luck, the future will hold as many promises, and just as many perils, as it did in my youth. With any luck.
41
@TRA. Yes, a post well aware of the effort, focus and energy it takes to live a conscious life. When I was a young parent, I thought I had all the answers. It took me decades to get lucky with that. I would not want to do it again with the same brain I had then. And, to do it again with a wise brain, I’m well aware of the gargantuan effort it takes to raise a child, day by day, according to their needs and not my own, in THIS society. There is no social support for parents. Not even child care. I wish I lived in....Denmark.
23