How to Print a Human: We desperately need new organs, and we’re running out of ways to get them (Mary Roach November 28, 2025, Nautilus)
I ask Feinberg when he thinks medical science will arrive at the point of implanting entire functional bioprinted organs in patients. If we use the analogy of airplane flight, he puts things somewhere around the Wright brothers stage. “Of course, we don’t want a plane that goes 30 feet down the field. We want a plane that can fly around all day.”
And how far off is that? A decade plus, Feinberg says.
For medical science, that’s actually a brisk turnaround. (In an earlier phone conversation, Feinberg equated “a decade or two” with “pretty quickly.”) He adds that he thought it could easily happen far sooner. “Because we keep coming up with new things.” Just 20 years ago, he points out, there was no gene editing, no CRISPR. “Plus AI is going to accelerate, and that’s going to change what’s possible.”
I pose the same question now to Jaci Bliley, a senior post-doctoral fellow in the lab. Bliley has just joined us in the microscope room. Two to three decades is her estimate. Like Feinberg, she says she’s surprised at how fast things are moving. She offers the example of some stand-alone beating heart ventricles, little tubular constructs that she printed as part of her Ph.D. research. “That was 2019,” she says. “Now we’re putting them into mice and they’re surviving. After six months they’re still alive and beating.”