About 10 years ago, a colleague and I happened to take the same morning off to visit our respective dentists. When Geoff bounded into the doorway of my office around lunchtime, he flashed his pearly whites and announced that his dentist had had a surprise for him: a 3D-printed crown, fabricated on the spot.
That should have been my first clue that the real promise of this technology was creating custom parts for individual bodies, not extruding plastic widgets in middle-school maker labs.
But it wasn’t. And not being the type to spend thousands of dollars on a large machine with no apparent household utility, I put 3D printing out of my mind.
Until senior editor Jill Patton, ’03, MA ’04, started bringing it up. There’s a lot of interesting research at Stanford on 3D printing, she would say. Find out more, I would say.
At first glance, 3D printing sounds like a topic. In the hands of Jill and of senior writer Sam Scott, it became a story.
There are stories that lend themselves to narrative. Profiles, for instance, such as our feature on Stanford art historian Alex Nemerov, who wants us to find moments of truth in art, or our article on cultural critic Rachel Syme, ’05, whose new book advocates reclaiming the practice of letter writing. Or essays, such as the meditation on brotherhood by Stan Wilson, ’74, or the drive down Memory Lane, aka Sand Hill Road, by Anne Sutton Canfield, ’67.
Then there are articles that are harder to craft. At first glance, 3D printing sounds like a topic. In the hands of Jill and of senior writer Sam Scott, it became a story. Through extensive research and conversation, they came to focus on four applications that, once fully realized, will improve human health: microneedles that deliver vaccine payloads or extract fluid for lab tests through the skin, tiny robots that densify blood clots so they can be more safely and easily removed, scaffolding that enables the repair of complex bone breaks, and a moonshot effort to 3D print a heart in less than an hour, before the tissue begins to die.
Once we had our story, we had to figure out how best to convey it to you. The most wonderful thing about magazines is the marriage of edit and art, a synergy that accomplishes more together than either of the two can alone. Illustrating this story began with generative conversations among creative director Erin Sonnenschein, art director Giorgia Virgili, Jill, Sam, and me. Erin was captivated by the notion of printing a heart in the time it takes to visit a 1-hour photo kiosk, and Giorgia contributed the pathos of the Tin Woodman pining away. Freelance illustrator Nathan Smith brought the cover to life and added whimsical touches to the 3D-printing pharmacy that opens the story. (My favorite: “Currently printing: horse jaw.” Jill’s: The Tin Woodman browsing essential oils.)
It all makes a 3D-printed crown look like child’s play.
Kathy Zonana, ’93, JD ’96, is the editor of Stanford. Email her at kathyz@stanford.edu.
