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未来器官移植不靠黑市靠3D打印文章来源| 财富If driverless cars save lives, where will we get organs?未来器官移植不靠黑市靠3D打印It’s a dark thought, and the sort of thing only a futurist would think of. Which is why I’m not surprised that Bre Pettis, founder and CEO of the 3D printing company Makerbot, brought it up. When I asked him about 3D-printed organs earlier this summer at the Northside Festival, a conference in Brooklyn, he told me that3D-printed body parts won’t become a reality until autonomous vehicles arrive to market. It makes for a surprising connection between two futuristic technologies.这是一个阴暗的想法，只有未来主义者才会产生这样的联想。

因此当3D打印公司Makerbot创始人兼首席执行官布利•佩蒂斯抛出这个问题时，我并不感到意外。

今年夏初，在布鲁克林的北边艺术节（Northside Festival）上，我询问他关于3D打印器官的问题，他回答说，直到自动驾驶汽车上市，3D打印人体器官才会成为现实。

两项富于未来气息的技术就这样意外地联系在了一起。

“The self-driving car is coming, and right now, our best supply of organs comes from car accidents,”he said. “So, if you need an organ you just wait for somebody to have an accident, and then you get their organ and you’re better.”I suggested that was a dark way of looking at it.佩蒂斯说：“自动驾驶汽车就要来了，而目前，人体器官的最佳来源是车祸。

也就是说，如果你需要进行器官移植，你必须得等待有人出车祸。

获得遇难者的器官后你就会好起来。

”我说，这种看法可够阴暗的。

His response: “We have this huge problem that we sort of don’t talk about, that people die all the time from car accidents. It’s kind of insane. But the most interesting thing is, if we can reduce accidents and deaths, then we actually have a whole other problem on our hands of, ‘Where do we get organs?’I don’t think we’ll actually be printing organs until we solve the self-driving car issue. The next problem will be organ replacement.”佩蒂斯回答道：“随时都有人在车祸中丧生，但我们似乎很少谈论这个大问题。

多少有些荒唐。

不过，最有意思的事情是，如果我们能够减少车祸数量和丧生人数，那么我们真的会遇到另一个棘手的大问题，那就是‘人体器官从哪儿来?’我觉得在解决自动驾驶汽车的问题之前，3D打印人体器官并不会真的实现。

接下来的问题将是器官替换。

”It’s not impossible to 3D-print an organ, he said, but there are challenges around raw materials. “Right now you take liver goo, and you squeeze liver goo into the shape of a liver and it grows together and hopefully becomes a liver. That’s the idea of 3D printing organs,”he said. The challenge, he said, will be getting the science of the “liver goo”right, before the actual printing part even comes into play.他指出，3D打印人体器官并非不可能，但原材料方面有一些难点。

“现在的方法是取来肝细胞，把它们弄成肝脏的形状，再盼着它们生长发育成肝脏。

这就是3D打印人体器官的思路。

”佩蒂斯说，难点在于正确地“取来肝细胞”，随后才是真的进行3D打印。

The self-driving car isn’t as far off as you might think. What once existed only the realm of science fiction is now roving around—albeit in an extremely limited fashion—in Nevada, Florida, California, and Michigan. What was once an easy punch line in parodies of Silicon Valley is now a fixture on Google’s corporate campus.自动驾驶汽车并不像大家想的那么遥远。

这种以前只出现在科幻小说里的东西现在已经开始四处游走，只不过活动范围很小，仅限于内华达州、佛罗里达州、加利福尼亚州和密歇根州。

以前人们奚落硅谷时，总会开自动驾驶汽车的玩笑，而现在，它已经是谷歌（Google）公司园区里的一款代步工具。

Adoption continues. Last month the U.K.’s Department of Transport announced that it would allow self-driving cars onto British streets by next year. A county in Iowa recently announced—at a symposium designed to attract Google and other tech companies to its region, naturally—that it would allow driverless cars on its streets. California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has been pushing to get broader regulations in place to allow self-driving cars on public roads.自动驾驶汽车的应用范围正在扩大。

英国交通部上个月宣布称，将在明年之前允许自动驾驶汽车在英国上路。

爱荷华州的某个区也在最近的一次研讨会上表示，将允许自动驾驶汽车在本地行驶——举办这次会议自然也是为了吸引谷歌和其他科技公司入驻这一地区。

加州机动车辆管理局则一直在设法扩大监管范围，以便自动驾驶汽车成为普通交通工具。

The potential benefits are hard to ignore. Each year 30,000 people die in traffic collisions in the U.S. Considering that 90% of U.S. auto collisions are blamed on human error—some 40% are the result of factors such as alcohol or fatigue—we have a lot to gain by outsourcing the task of driving to computers.这样做的潜在好处很难让人熟视无睹。

在美国，每年有3万人死于交通事故。

考虑到其中90%的车祸是由人为失误造成，而且大约40%的事故缘于酒后驾车或疲劳驾驶，把操控汽车的任务交给计算机会让我们受益匪浅。

If 10% of vehicles were self-driving, it could reduce the number of accidents by 211,000 and in turn save 1,100 lives,according to a 2013 study by the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, D.C. If 90% of vehicles were autonomous, an estimated 4.2 million accidents would be prevented and 21,700 lives would be saved.华盛顿非营利智囊机构伊诺交通中心(Eno Center for Transportation)在2013年进行的研究表明，如果美国10%的车辆可以自动驾驶，交通事故就会减少21.1万起，1100条生命就能得到挽救。

如果自动驾驶汽车的比例达到90%，就可以避免420万起车祸，2.17万人将因此获救。

Technological advances often come with unintended consequences, though, which is why these predictions support Pettis’case that organ donations would beadversely impacted by safer driving. Motor vehicle accidents are the largest contributor to organ donations after natural-cause deaths. Since 1994, 16% of all organ donations came from motor vehicle accidents, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.不过，技术进步经常带来意想不到的影响。