We could one day stop an epidemic in its tracks by downloading a file and printing our own vaccines, avoiding a Contagion-like epidemic, if Craig Venter's vision of the future comes to pass.
Venter discussed his 3D printer for synthetic organisms, which would be similar to today's 3D printers, which use special materials to produce three dimensional products in your home from a downloaded blueprint. In the case of the life printer, the cartridges would hold chemicals like DNA base pairs, the building blocks of genes.
Ventner presented his ideas at the Wired Health Conference today. He calls it a "digital biological converter," or "teleporter."
Venter, the high-profile geneticist and synthetic biologist who is best known for heading the first group to sequence a full human genome, founded several research centers including the J. Craig Venter Institute, where he now works.
His group there is testing out scenarios in which they have less than 24 hours to build a vaccine that could be disseminated with a file sent to the life-printing machine. Then, the printed vaccine could be injected to produce immunity to the virus in question, stopping an epidemic in its tracks.
Obviously, the idea is still in the pilot phases, and there will need to be hefty regulation surrounding any way it would be introduced into the public, so people can't go printing their own viruses and bacteria, and so people won't be getting spam vaccines.
"Regulation will be an interesting aspect of this," Venter said in his presentation. "We get a lot of spam e-mail. People making fake drugs and selling them for profit. It's a nasty world out there."