organic chemists make molecules very
complicated molecules by chopping up a
big molecule into small molecules and
get reverse engineering and as a chemist
one of the things I wanted to ask my
research group a couple of years ago is
could we make a really cool Universal
chemistry set in essence could we app
chemistry now what would this mean and
how would we do it well to start to do
this we took a 3d printer and we started
to print our beakers and our test tubes
on one side and then print the molecule
at the same time on the other side and
combine them together and what we call
reaction where and so by printing the
vessel and doing the chemistry at the
same time we may start to access this
Universal tool kit of chemistry now what
could this mean well if we can bed
biological and chemical networks like a
search engine so if you have a cell
that's ill you need to cure or bacteria
that you want to kill if you have this
embedded in your device at the same time
and you do the chemistry you may be able
to make drugs in a new way so how are we
doing this in the lab will it require
software it requires hardware and it
requires chemical inks and so the really
cool bit is the idea is we want to have
a universal set of inks that we put out
with the printer and you download the
blueprint the organic chemistry for that
molecule and you make it in the device
and so you can make your molecule in the
printer using this software so what
could this mean well ultimately it could
mean that you can print your own
medicine and this is what we're doing in
the lab at the moment but to take baby
steps to get there first of all we want
to look at drug design and production or
drug discovery and manufacturing because
if we can manufacture it after we
discovered it we could deploy it
anywhere you don't need to go to the
chemist anymore we can print drugs at
point of need we can download new
Diagnostics say
new super bug is emerged you put it in
your search engine and you create the
drug to treat the threat so this allows
you on the fly molecular assembly but
perhaps for me the Corbett going into
the future is this idea of taking your
own stem cells with your jeans and your
environment and you print your own
personal medicine and if that doesn't
seem fanciful enough where do you think
we're going to go well you're going to
have your own personal matter fabricator
beam me up Scotty