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from the how-would-you-like-your-skin-sir? dept.
Cosmetics manufacturer L'Oréal is teaming up with bioengineering start-up Organovo to begin 3D-printing human skin. L'Oréal already grows human skin samples:
L'Oréal currently grows skin samples from tissues donated by plastic surgery patients. It produces more than 100,000, 0.5 sq cm skin samples per year and grows nine varieties across all ages and ethnicities.
Its statement explaining the advantage of printing skin, offered little detail: "Our partnership will not only bring about new advanced in vitro methods for evaluating product safety and performance, but the potential for where this new field of technology and research can take us is boundless."
Organovo has previously offered 3D-printed liver tissue for researchers and pharmaceutical companies:
"It was unclear how liver-like the liver structures were," said Alan Faulkner-Jones, a bioengineering research scientist at Heriot Watt university. Printing skin could be a different proposition, he thinks. "Skin is quite easy to print because it is a layered structure," he told the BBC. "The advantages for the cosmetics industry would be that it doesn't have to test products on animals and will get a better response from human skin."
But printed skin has more value in a medical scenario, he thinks. "It would be a great thing to have stores of spare skins for burn victims."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @11:15PM
It could replace foreskins. Not the one barbarically removed from me in my infancy, but the one I've had since birth. It looks like an elephant trunk made from chewed bubble gum.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 21 2015, @12:46AM
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=love+the+skin+you%27re+in [google.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday May 21 2015, @01:54PM
Perhaps. The foreskin is more than just skin; the tendon that allows it to keep the glans an internal organ except during sexual arousal also needs to be replaced. There are probably other glands that would need to be included since the foreskin's primary function is not only to protect the glans but to moisturize it.
The difficult part is in repairing damage that occurs when the foreskin is forcefully torn from the glans (from what I understand, it takes about 18 months to fully detach* after birth) and the additional damage to the exposed glans that happens over time.
It amazes me the doublethink involved in justifying infant genital mutilation (some of the same involved in justifying it for females—and let's be honest: this hysteria about sewing the vagina shut and amputating large portions of the external genitalia is not representative of routine female genital mutilation where that's practiced and that hysteria detracts from the real issue of genital mutilation in general). They say it protects from sexually transmitted diseases. How much sex do infants have?! If there were something to the science, we'd wait until perhaps age 5 to perform the procedure.
Also, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the procedure has complications for 1 out of 500 men. Now, I wonder…. I know a guy who takes meds that make him infertile because getting hard is physically painful for him, sometimes excruciatingly so. According to his doctor, there's nothing wrong down there. Another guy I know told me about a loop of skin he had until about age 28, which is likely a form of adhesion that can result from infant circumcision.
Infant genital mutilation is generally done without follow-up care. Just vapid instructions to the parents that may or may not be followed. I wonder how many complications the American Academy of Pediatrics would find if they did a broader survey of men circumcised in infancy without their consent?
Now, I know some men choose to have their foreskin amputated as adults, and I don't see anything wrong with that (other than wondering why proper hygiene is such a trouble for them). To each their own, I suppose. People do weirder things with their bodies.
In my mind, the primary problem is ethical, and it's a whopper that never gets press time. Like I always ask, how much sex do infants have?
I remember we lost our shit in 2012 because somebody suggested vaccinating 12 year old girls against HPV. I think it was a few months later that the American Academy of Pediatrics published a piece that generated sick headlines like “Men Better Off Circumcised.” Why? Because they have data that mutilating the genitals of an infant boy has some slight statistical significance in reducing the transmission of HPV to their sexual partners.
I mean. What. The. Fuck. We'd rather mutilate genitals than use the vastly more effective vaccine? And it wasn't even autism hogwash. It was because we can't sexualize a teenage girl. Why the fuck are we sexualizing infant boys and amputating their body parts?
Alas, this is just yet another symptom of gender hysteria and the idea that men are nothing more than machines or robots to be shamed for some kind of programming defect they're all supposed to have and to be used as a sexual object and source of income for cisgendered women.
* From what I remember reading, it's not “attached” per se at birth, but I'm forgetting the correct term at the moment.