DESMA 9 Emilie- U6: Biotech + Art

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U6: Biotech + Art

    This week was a little interesting, in the sense that I had way too many exciting subjects to choose from. There’s nutrition, with soylent green and Your Brain on Food. In a cluster class, we went into great detail discussing real life Soylent, and I literally have a book at home called Your Brain On Food that I wrote a report on. There  is the 3D printing of organic materials to print organ transplants, and there are neuroprosthetics, the field I want to get into, but the classroom sources provided on Canvas don’t support the decision to talk about that. That brings us to something I’ve had a tiny bit of experience with: micromanipulation.

Embryonic transplant gif from EMutagen website


    The Transplant Sculpting section of the site EMutagen details the micromanipulation and microsurgery involved with embryonic transplants. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful, but the author brings up a good point on artist-scientists. They are pioneers seeking to understand the enigma of our universe regardless of hard fact, and this article poses some extremely philosophically loaded questions and viewpoints.




Older vs newer microsurgery robots. Compare old (on the left) with microsurgery training image shown later.


The DaVinci Robot in practice

microsurgery training

    It also made me think of my admittedly limited experience with “microsurgery” (I was manipulating blocks, not human tissue). At one point a while ago, I had gone to a science convention where they had this DaVinci remote surgical robotics system for us to try. When moving the larger arms and forceps, we were manipulating tiny versions of it, and seeing the result on the screen (that was to show the microscopic view). This process could possibly be widely used in microsurgeries or minimally invasive surgeries, though it requires a ton of training to get the right motions and feel of the robot. Back then, it was still in mid-to-late stages, but they’ve massively improved technology since, and it is my understanding that they now use remote surgical and microsurgical robots to aid in surgery. I cannot remember the year I got to experience this, but I do remember jumping back in line a few times to keep trying it out.






References

Davincisurgery.com, www.davincisurgery.com/. 


“Initial Attempts at Embryonic Transplant Surgery.” VivoArts: Embryonic Sculpting, emutagen.com/embryo.html. 


“Developing Robot Platforms for Microsurgery.” Microsure, microsure.nl/. 


Early microsurgery robot. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vswetha-E-Jeganathan/publication/38011571/figure/fig2/AS:533489264140288@1504205160244/Robot-assisted-microsurgery_Q320.jpg Image. 


Microsure microsurgery robot. https://microsure.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Microsure-receives-CE-Mark.jpg Image. 


Microsurgery training. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zUg7ckQr114/maxresdefault.jpg Image. 


DaVinci robotic remote surgery. http://www.jeffstevensen.com/wp-content/uploads/20120927_3609_650px.jpg Image. 



Comments

  1. Joseph_GreenMay 8, 2021 at 3:09 PM

    The topics you chose were very interesting and aesthetically your blog looks very nice. I wish you went into more detail about the micro-surgery machine and into what the philosophically loaded questions were!

    ReplyDelete

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