Will head transplants create an entirely new person?

Is a person more than their brain? Shutterstock

The world’s first full head transplant could take place as soon as 2017 if the controversial plans by Italian neuroscientist Dr Sergio Canavero come to pass. Wheelchair-bound Valery Spiridonov, who has the muscle-wasting Werdnig Hoffman disease, has volunteered to have his head transplanted onto a healthy body in a day-long operation.

The proposed surgery is highly controversial and its feasibility has been questioned by experts. But Dr Canavero’s plans also raise complex philosophical and ethical issues. A natural question is whether a living person with Spridinov’s head and someone else’s body would be the same person as Spridinov. In interviews, Spridinov has made it clear that he sees the proposed procedure as a way for him to live on with a new and healthy body.

A different perspective would be that Spridinov is a head-donor rather than the recipient of a new body. He is donating his head to someone else who will live the rest of his life with Spridinov’s head but won’t be the same person as Spridinov. On this account, Spridinov is signing his own death warrant by volunteering for the surgery.

Despite the advanced science involved, the issues the proposed surgery raises aren’t new. Writing in the 17th century, English philosopher John Locke claimed that sameness of person is fundamentally a matter of mental continuity. He illustrated his point by means of a famous thought experiment: imagine that the soul of a prince, carrying consciousness of the prince’s past life, were to enter the body of a cobbler. Everyone can see, Locke contends, that the person with the cobbler’s body and the prince’s consciousness would be the prince and not the cobber. It would be just to punish this person for the prince’s past misdeeds but not the cobbler’s.

Locke’s view continues to be highly influential today, but it is assumed by most philosophers that the seat of consciousness is the brain rather than the soul. A modern variation on Locke’s example, devised by American philosopher Sydney Shoemaker, involves transplantation of the brain rather than the soul. If Mr Brown’s brain were transplanted into Mr Robinson’s de-brained skull, the resulting person – Shoemaker calls him Mr Brownson - would look like Robinson but would in fact be Brown as long as he is aware of Brown’s past as his own past.

Locke’s theory can be seen as justifying Spridinov’s view of Dr Canavero’s procedure. Spridinov’s head is where his brain is. Since his brain is the seat of his mental life, the person with Spridinov’s head and someone else’s body would be mentally continuous with Spridinov and so would be him.

However, there is no guarantee that things will turn out this way. Another possibility is that the surgery will wipe out Spridinov’s memories. The person who wakes from head transplant surgery might have no consciousness of Spridinov’s past and no sense of himself as Spridinov. If this were to happen Spridinov would no longer exist on Locke’s view. Instead, the surgery would bring into existence a new person who happens to have with Spridinov’s head.

Locke’s theory has recently come under fire from philosophers who call themselves “animalists”. They hold that each of us is a human animal, and the person who emerges from the surgery is the same person as Spridinov just as long as he is the same human animal as Spridinov. Unlike Locke, animalists think that this is a physical rather than a mental or psychological matter. Our mental lives can be disrupted without calling into question our continued existence.

Even from an animalist perspective, there is a case for saying that if any person wakes up from the surgery that person will be Spridinov. A human animal can arguably survive the loss of its limbs and most of its internal organs as long as its head and brain are kept alive and functional. The whole body isn’t required. For animalists, as for Locke, Spridinov might be right to think that he is being offered a new body rather than certain death. But sameness of person might be seen as being of little value without the mental continuity.

If what matters to Spridinov is mental continuity as well as having a healthy body then it will not be possible to determine whether the surgery is successful in these terms until after the event. The impact of head transplants on our mental lives remains unknown.

Jaw-bone discovery reveals more about secret sex lives of Neanderthals and early humans

The look of love? Human meets Neanderthal. DrMikeBaxter/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

A fossilised jaw bone of one of Europe’s earliest modern human, discovered in a cave in Romania, has unveiled fresh evidence about what Neanderthals and humans got up to some 40,000 years ago. Geneticists have found that the individual had between 8 per cent and 11 per cent of its genome derived from Neanderthals – which is far more than any other modern human skeleton sequenced so far.

In the past decade, the analysis of ancient DNA from fossil skeletons of anatomically modern humans has revealed a startling fact: some of our direct ancestors had sex with Neanderthals, producing fertile offspring. Prior to these genetic revelations, anthropological researchers were divided between those who firmly believed that such unions either did not occur, or that they could not have yielded sexually fertile offspring, because the differences between early modern humans and Neanderthal genomes would have been too great.

A well-known modern example of this kind of cross-breeding is that between a horse and a donkey, which yields a sterile offspring (the mule).

The researchers prepared two DNA extracts from 25 and 10 mg of bone powder taken from the jawbone. Svante Pääbo, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Now that the closeness between the DNA of early modern humans and Neanderthals has been established, geneticists have begun to find a few rare fossils that contain a mixture of the two. A new study presents the latest and perhaps most intriguing of these discoveries: A fossil jawbone of a male, human skull that has been radiocarbon dated at 37,000 to 42,000 years ago. The fossils came from a site called Peştera cu Oase in Romania, making it one of the oldest early modern humans known from Europe.

The fact that this individual carried more Neanderthal DNA than any other anatomically modern human ever tested is surprising and means that the mating between a Neanderthal and a modern human took place as recently as in his great-grandfather’s generation. Statistical analysis of the DNA composition of the skeleton suggests that the person carried as much as 8-11% Neanderthal genes in his DNA.

The enigma of modern Europeans' DNA

Surprisingly, in spite of the two populations being in contact for many thousands of years, there is no DNA evidence for interbreeding between Neanderthals and the ancestors of the Europeans living today. In fact, segments of Neanderthal DNA turn up in modern human DNA from East Asians and Native Americans far more than they do from Europeans. But if the anatomically modern human population of ice-age Romania did interbreed with Neanderthals, then why didn’t the Neanderthal DNA signature carry through to modern Europeans?

Analysis revealed the Oase man was no direct ancestor of modern Europeans Svante Pääbo, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The research sheds some light on this conundrum as well. It appears that the ancient Romanians were not the direct ancestors of modern Europeans. Instead it was immigrant populations of early humans originating from the Middle East and southeast Europe that passed on their genes while sweeping through Europe, bringing farming and animal husbandry with them. This new lifestyle replaced the hunter-gather way of life that had characterised all previous human societies.

Other ancient skeletons of modern humans from Eurasia help flesh out the story of relations between Neadnerthals and humans from the last ice age. An individual from the Kostenki 14 site in western Russia shared from 1.7-3.8% DNA with Neanderthals (Location 2 on the map). This skeleton was dated to 36,000-39,000 years old, and the individual was more closely related to later Europeans than to East Asians.

Map showing the location of three recently found fossil skeletons that contain a mixture of modern human and Neanderthal DNA Author provided

Meanwhile, a 45,000-year-old fossil skeleton from the Ust’-Ishim site in Western Siberia contained from 0.4 to 3.6% Neanderthal DNA (Location 3 on the map).

The studies of the Kostenki 14 and Ust’-Ishim specimens show that gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans at these sites occurred well before these individuals lived. In the latter case, it could have been around a thousand years before the Ust’-Isham individual lived – much earlier than in Romania.

The fascinating findings, made thanks to the rapid advances in genome sequencing that we’ve seen over the past decade, represent important but small pieces of the puzzle describing the origin of the humans living today. No doubt will many more secrets be unveiled in the near future.

How the wisdom of the crowd can turn into social media mob rule

A mob of keyboard warriors is not so different from the pitchfork-wielding variety. Robert Couse-Baker, CC BY

When what Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt intended as an after dinner speech was made public he suffered the consequences, as have several others before him, including the loss of his positions at UCL and the Royal Society.

Recently, sitting on a panel discussion on privacy in the digital world it was surprising to hear how people who marvel at their voice control televisions, phones and tablets don’t always make the connection that such a feature means their device is also listening to them. If Edward Snowden’s revelations have done anything it’s to remind us that whatever we say can be overheard somewhere. What becomes of what we say depends on who or what is listening and what is done with that information.

The sharing of information is socially ordered; there are some things you might say to your partner, child, boss or the Inland Revenue, and all of these can be mutually exclusive. The digital world radically changes this social organisation of information and reduces control over who has access to it and the uses to which it is put. This is a change we are only just beginning to learn to deal with.

Open source software pioneer Eric Raymond said in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. He was describing how software development can thrive not as a cadre (“priesthood”) of highly paid experts, but rather as millions of volunteers of varying skills willing to contribute time programming and looking for bugs. This is the open source approach. The principles of crowdsourcing are based on a similar notion, giving rise to user-generated sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube.

The power of “Organising without organisations” is what internet theorist Clay Shirky ascribed to this phenomenon, where powerful social movements emerge online not because of expert leadership but because the decentralised internet empowers their participation.

There are some who argue for the Twitter mob on the basis that it generates valuable debates – a kind of public flogging for the 21st century.

Others are not as sanguine about crowdsourcing and the social media inquisition. In his new book, The Internet is Not the Answer, Andrew Keen writes that the internet is “empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than making us happy, it’s compounding our rage”. Worse, when Twitter users pick their victims they sometimes get it horribly wrong and attack the wrong person. In other cases, they misinterpret the meaning of comments, such as with Peter Tatchell’s comments on Mary Beard.

As instances of cyberbullying all too frequently illustrate, recent sociological scholarship correlates violent mob mentality to the suppression of a moral code. Studies into the strength of like-minded communities online – what Eli Pariser calls filter bubbles – suggest that the internet is not decentralising communication into a level playing field as we once thought. Instead it is becoming a tool for the re-establishment and re-enforcing of tribal groupings, and the monopolisation of debate by micro-celebrities who may or may not be deserving of serious attention.

The type of Twitterstorm that erupted around Hunt is an opportunity to contrast the supposed “wisdom of the crowds”, as discussed in James Surowiecki’s book of the same name celebrating crowdsourcing, against how the internet provides the means to support and spread socially unregulated moral panics.

While Hunt’s comments are offensive and unbecoming of a Nobel Prize winner, the method by which he was prosecuted needs further scrutiny. As we put increasing faith in social media to solve social problems – from the building of the world’s most linked-to website, to student recruitment drives, to the functions of government – we may want to reflect upon the supposed wisdom of the crowd.

This Father's Day, how about eating one of your kids? Bad tips from the animal kingdom

A hungry assassin bug father munches on one of his babies. James Gilbert, Author provided

Each father’s day we celebrate male parental care. But this year – perhaps while getting the old man an appreciative gift -– maybe have a think about why men want to care for their children at all. As opposed to, say, eating them alive.

Fatherhood comes so naturally to us that we can easily forget to ask about how and why it might have evolved. In fact, most fathers in the animal kingdom don’t do it. We fall into a rather rare group of species where males provide any care at all.

In our primate relatives, for instance, males are not at all doting – with a few exceptions, like male marmosets, who carry babies on their backs. This lightens the load on the female – presumably allowing her to make the male’s babies bigger, or to have more of them.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder?

Among mammals, dads rarely contribute to offspring beyond a single sperm - the mother generally nurses offspring alone. Except in Dayak fruit bats, where males have been found lactating (although still contentious).

Male and female grey jays feeding chicks. Dan Strickland/Wikipedia

It is in birds that male-female cooperation is most common, probably because feeding chicks and keeping them safe and warm is a two-person job. But in other birds – where newborn chicks can get up and walk for themselves, like chickens and ducks – the male is typically nowhere to be seen. He’s off soliciting new mates.

Best of a bad job

Males will sometimes help females out if they are unlikely to find another mate. Burying beetles breed on fresh mouse carcasses, which are very scarce. Having finally found a carcass, a male will stick around and help the female care because he is unlikely to find another - but he will also keep signalling to attract other females. The resident female is understandably not on board with this, and knocks him over while he’s trying to signal.

In many familiar species like gorillas and lions, males that appear to be caring are really mostly concerned about guarding their baby-mamas from rival males; the offspring are kept safe as a byproduct.

Ranitomeya poison frogs cooperate to raise offspring Nicop69/Wikipedia

Yet some amazing examples of biparental care exist. In Peruvian poison frogs, the male carefully carries his tadpoles to a water pool. There, he monitors their progress for months: every week or so the watchful male calls to the female, who comes and deposits special nutritional eggs into the pool for the tadpoles to eat.

But in most cases, fathers are conspicuous by their absence - deserting the female as soon as they can.

Why so callous? To begin with, super-cheap sperm means the most successful males can potentially have unlimited offspring - if the species’ ecology allows it. This can even hold true for humans. The Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco, for example, may have had more than 1,000 children (compare that to the women’s record, a nevertheless astonishing 69).

But because it takes two to create a baby, the fact that some males can be extremely successful means that others get nothing (Ismail’s citadel must have been full of childless men). Today we think of ourselves as monogamous, but there are often still more childless men than women. For those male animals that are more successful, caring interferes with a winner’s strategy of pursuing mating. So in evolutionary terms males need a very, very good reason to care for offspring, or they will always do better seeking mates.

Dads defying the odds

Yet, in some species, males do all the care, with females contributing little apart from eggs. Although fairly common in egg-laying fish, male seahorses have taken it to extremes – they have a placenta and give birth to live young. Male rheas sit for weeks on a pile of up to 80 eggs, while male brushturkeys carefully tend piles of fermenting leaves so that the heat can incubate their eggs. In weird “sea spiders”, males tend eggs in all 1,300-odd species.

Male seahorses become pregnant, nourishing and protecting their fry until birth Kevin Bryant/Flickr

Sometimes males have no choice but to care. Some males have to “mate-guard” females against rival males, right up until egg-laying - whereupon the female can run away leaving the male holding the babies. In others, like kiwis, females produce huge offspring and exhaust themselves, leaving males little option but to care. In Neanthes worms, before caring, the male resourcefully eats the female.

Occasionally, as in jacanas, males greatly outnumber females, who can therefore get away with dumping males with offspring. These males are unlikely to secure another mate, so their best option is to care.

But many of these “superdads” do some pretty cold calculus. Single dads are most likely to evolve where they still can mate while caring, and where care is cheap (like standing guard as opposed to feeding young). In territorial species like rheas and egg-laying fish, males with good territories guard clutches from many females. Or they make sure to seal the deal on their paternity. A male giant water bug carries only one female’s eggs on his back – but he makes the female mate several times while laying eggs.

In assassin bugs, males also accumulate eggs from many females, like rheas. But care is hungry work for these predators. They have a dark solution: to maintain body weight, they eat some of their own eggs.

Male scissortail sergeants eat their whole brood if it’s not big enough to bother caring for Patrick Randall/Flickr

Male scissortail sergeant fish make an even more straightforward calculation. If the brood is too small, they cannibalise the entire brood and search for another mate. Makes sense – without a parent, the babies are doomed, so why waste them?

Humans: the verdict

Where do human fathers fit? They don’t habitually eat offspring, nor do they accumulate piles of babies from many women. As always, there is a lot of variation. Some are not involved, like the male chimpanzees to whom we are most closely related. But many enjoy a long and satisfying fatherhood, both teaching and learning from their children. These men may be more like wolf fathers – who provide food for their partner while she is pregnant and for their cubs once weaned; they also critically provide behavioural input in terms of play, and act as a role model. Most likely, this has evolved because such learning and experience are vital to offspring success in both species.

Grey wolf fathers are highly involved in parental care Taral Jansen/Wikipedia

As a new dad myself, this father’s day, I am thankful I belong to a species where fathers can make a valuable contribution to their offspring’s lives beyond mere genetics.

Internet has hidden perils for teenagers – but spying on them isn't the answer

All smiles - but who's watching what they're watching? LG, CC BY

The South Korean government has required that teenagers install a spy app on their smartphones. Having the app is compulsory for teens – their phones won’t work unless it is installed. When installed, it provides parents with a means to see what sites are being accessed, block sites and send warning notifications.

Even in a society that is more accepting of such paternalistic state control than western Europe, in a culture regularly referred to as collectivist, the Korean government’s requirement to install its Smart Sheriff app or one of the government-approved alternatives has attracted lively debate. Is there a case for such measures?

In the West we have become used to patronising advice on food and health and safety-related prescriptions. We also generally accept some form of legislation where our long-term well-being is at stake, with special consideration given to minors. For example, rules about who is allowed to drive cars or consume addictive, harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco.

But surely the internet is full of good and bad things alike? If we accept state-prescribed parental control over young people’s existence online, why wouldn’t we also demand full 24-hour CCTV monitoring of their offline existence too?

Learning life online takes time

There are some fundamental differences between online and offline spaces – and these touch upon how humans work psychologically. Imagine that a child ventures out, alone, into a large city of average safety. Whether you are comfortable or not with this thought, a number of factors lower the risks of harm.

For example, the child will be visible and identifiable as a child to numerous people. The time the child is away is somewhat proportionate to the distance he or she can cover. The urban environment is segmented in a way that public space slowly blends into not-so-public space, and potential sources of harm are usually visible and well-defined.

But all of this applies only very weakly to the online world, where there is little resistance to those who wish to enter – or have stumbled across – harmful places. Virtual space is human-made and does not come with the natural physical boundaries and rules the world is otherwise automatically subject to.

Our early-years growth – and this is a process that takes years – is typically spent coming to terms with navigating the real, offline world. In contrast, making an assessment of the semantic content of a website is something that a lot of adults struggle with – let alone young beginners.

Do teenagers need watching, or should they be left to make their own mistakes? teenagers by bokan/shutterstock.com

Guiding not spying

Maybe then this is simply a case for guided development? Sadly, researchers know very little about the development of internet literacy and, in general, current debate demonstrates that neither parents nor politicians know very much about it either. Mediation by parents plays a crucial role in this development – but there are no simple recipes.

The underlying reasons for this state of misinformation could be very simple: while the internet facilitates and encourages content creation and sharing, it doesn’t encourage the sharing of screen time. Sitting together in front of a computer or looking jointly at a smartphone display is only done for specific online activities such as showing each other content that has already been found. The process itself of navigating and searching the internet is far less attractive for sharing – users young and old are much more likely to interact on the internet than about the internet – so the process of learning is solitary.

There are other challenges associated with monitoring internet use. Controlling access by blocking particular websites and search terms doesn’t account for what happens within widely accepted websites, such as social media giants like Facebook and Twitter. In fact it’s in this very area that most research into the negative effects of online activities has focused, such as about the grooming of minors. While some sites are closed to younger users, they are only technically so – on the basis of legal terms and conditions that are rarely if ever enforced. Again, the way we communicate online has vastly reduced the physical, social and cultural constraints we experience face-to-face.

So it’s close to impossible to monitor children’s online activities within particular web services without demanding fundamental changes to these services. Simple address blocking of dangerous web sites will capture only a tiny part of risky online activities. And sending alerts to parents cannot be really effective if parents lack the skills and understanding to act on them appropriately.

This is the dilemma: rules and requirements such as South Korea’s app are not merely examples of state oppression. The internet is different from the real world, and based on our current knowledge there is nothing to suggest that young users are well equipped to avoid harm online. But the Korean intervention, however, is not likely to be effective. For the moment, we’re back to urging youngsters to browse responsibly.

Galactico Christian Ronaldo has the earliest stars in the universe named after him

Artist's impression of CR7. ESO/M. Kornmesser, CC BY

Astronomers have caught a glimpse of what could be the earliest stars ever spotted. Found in a very distant galaxy, which has been nicknamed “CR7” in reference to the Portuguese footballer Christian Ronaldo, the stars would have lived shortly after the Big Bang. They belong to a class of stars that has possibly never been seen before – stars that are uncontaminated with the metals that appeared later in the evolution of the universe.

The discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

Moon rise at the Very Large Telescope F. Char/ESO, CC BY

The galaxy was observed at a redshift of ~7, which means it has taken the light from it well over 12bn years to reach the Earth. This means that the galaxy was in existence a mere ~800m years after the Big Bang.

The oldest stars are the purest

Arguably, our own Sun is an unremarkable and fairly young star situated in the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. But for it to appear exactly like it does – a yellowish orb – the universe must have evolved significantly from its initial state at the Big Bang.

When we perform a spectroscopic analysis of the Sun, we find that not only do we have very common elements such as hydrogen and helium present within, but there are also heavier elements such as oxygen and carbon.

This may not sound surprising at first, but in contrast to the very early universe, elements that are heavier than helium are comparatively rare. Just how did the Sun become “dirty” with these extra elements? It must have been through nuclear evolution in the cores of stars from the elements present in the early universe to those that are observed today.

When dealing with cosmic chemistry, astronomers like to have a full working knowledge of the periodic table. Due to the comparative rarity of elements other than hydrogen and helium in the universe, the astronomer’s periodic table is remarkably simple, labelling most elements as “metals”. There are but three elements in it: hydrogen, helium and “metals”.

Astronomer’s periodic table Kevin Pimbblet, adapted from wikipedia commons

It is the presence of these “metals”, such as oxygen and carbon, that make the Sun “dirty” or “polluted” compared to much earlier stars in the universe. And the Sun is not alone. There are many stars in the disk of the Milky Way that are similarly polluted with heavier elements. All of these polluted stars appear to have formed relatively recently.

Stellar work

Past research has suggested that the stars that make up the Milky Way were composed of at least two fundamentally different populations. Stars that contained an appreciable fraction of “metals” were labelled as Population I stars. This includes our very own Sun. On the other hand, stars that were unpolluted with metals, were termed Population II stars.

Given that the universe is becoming more “metallic” with time due to the production of more “metals” inside stars with every generation, we can conclude that Population II stars must have formed much earlier in the universe than Population I stars such as our Sun.

The researchers must be a fan of CR7. Ludovic Péron/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Interestingly, this cannot be the entire story. Although they are very old, Population II stars can not have been the first stars in the Universe. Astronomers have long predicted that a third class must exist.

The very earliest stars – the first generation – must have formed from pristine hydrogen and helium. These stars would have had only very trace amounts of metals (and mostly lithium at that), in line with the elemental composition of the universe shortly after the Big Bang. All of these stars were therefore made of the same materials and would have had approximately the same mass and nearly the same life expectancy. This is because without the availability of molecules containing elements such as oxygen, small stars could not have formed.

First-generation stars were therefore very, very massive, bright, and exceptionally short-lived – a life expectancy of mere millions of years. However, proof has been exceptionally hard to come by.

The observations of galaxy CR7 showed strongly ionized helium was present, but no heavier elements. Critically, it is this lack of heavier metallic elements that indicates that the stars within this bright galaxy are Population III.

Not only is this a success in confirming the theory behind Population III stars, but it validates that we can track down the very earliest stars in the Universe – stars that were very different to our own, unremarkable, Sun. And that is no small feat. It is within these Population III stars that the heavier elements that make up human beings, such as carbon, were created.

It's not just hype – 3D printing is the bridge to the future

'Here I am, the most intelligent robot in the galaxy, welding a bridge.' Heijmans

A company in the Netherlands is building a bridge across a canal in Amsterdam using 3D-printing robots. It seems that such attention-grabbing headlines appear regularly to declare how 3D-printing is destined to revolutionise manufacturing of all kinds. If the idea that key manufacturing products such as cars, aircraft – or indeed bridges – built by 3D printing sounds like hype, you’re mistaken.

It’s human nature to be suspicious of new things: we find them both attractive and worrying. The manufactured world around us has been made by cutting and casting and forging for many centuries. We are very comfortable with those processes and we believe that engineers and scientists can exert complete control over them, using these technologies to create the safe and predictable world (on an engineering level at least) we inhabit. This new way of making through 3D printing, in contrast, seems to have appeared suddenly and, somewhat reminiscent of the way it creates, almost out of thin air.

3D printing, or additive manufacturing as it’s also known, has in fact been in use since the 1980s, beginning as a means of prototyping objects through various stages of development. Decades later, we have gained a huge wealth of knowledge and understanding of how the process works. We may marvel at the wonder of it all – and the weird and wonderful shapes that can be created through 3D printing. But the main concern for many is that the properties of 3D-printed materials are equal to their conventionally manufactured equivalents.

To answer this concern, generally speaking a 3D-printed component can have comparable properties to one made conventionally. For example, some surgical implants are already made in this way. Many people have a 3D-printed hip implant, for example, and we know that 3D-printed parts have been a feature of Formula 1 cars and military aircraft for years – and perform very well in those applications. What we are seeing now is that the technology is becoming more mainstream – and that change is helping drive a huge explosion of creative thought about how, and where, we make things.

Surgical implants and even biological tissues can now be 3D printed. Andrew Milligan/PA

Many of the more ambitious ideas about large-scale 3D printing emerge from laboratories and studios of artists and architects who see this as an opportunity to give their ideas physical form, enabling bespoke creations using free-form fabrication. Take for example this bridge in Amsterdam using torch-wielding robot welders: the company behind the project, MX3D, which was formed by Dutch architect and designer Joris Laarman, demonstrated its technology last year and has shown the courage of its convictions in performing this “research” in public.

Aerospace is another great supporter of emerging technologies, and large aerospace companies and supply chains are very clear that they intend to employ 3D printing as a means to manufacture airframes and engine components. In the US, GE, Lockheed Martin and Pratt and Whitney, and Airbus, Rolls Royce and GKN Aerospace in Europe have all made recent investments and announcements of products that employ 3D printing in the direct manufacture of complex components. It’s even a technique used for the manufacture of spacecraft.

Despite all these high-profile, major industrial users there is a feeling among many, still, that 3D printing is all hype that will blow over soon – that there is an element of the Emperor’s New Clothes about it.

If I were to draw a comparison with another field: in 2001 just as the internet was truly taking off worldwide, the author Douglas Adams made a radio programme called the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future in which he recalled a number of conversations with those working in publishing, music and broadcasting. They were interested to know what impact the emergence of computers would have on their industries – clearly hoping, he said, that the answer would be “not very much”. Of course 15 years on we know just what a significant impact digitisation and the internet has had – changing business models, consumer behaviour and expectations beyond imagination.

The reality is that we don’t know where 3D printing will lead us but its potential to change the way we manufacture the things we use in our lives is enormous. As with those in Adams' programme, perhaps hoping that the impact of this emerging technology will also be “not very much” is not the right approach. Instead, as with the revolutionary effects it has had on the media, embracing the opportunities it affords us as manufacturers could take us in directions we hadn’t previously considered possible.