Film Analysis: The Fifth Element

One of the most exciting new technologies being developed today is the manufacture of replacement body parts to be used to treat illnesses in humans. Today, this is accomplished in part through the use of bio-printing to 3-D print living cells into more complex structures. In the movie, The Fifth Element, there is a scene that takes this technology to the extreme and manufactures an entirely new human. The process used in the movie starts from a sample of one cell, preserved inside of a metal gauntlet, and then proceeds to recreate the person whose cell that used to be. The print in the movie is physically done by creating one part of the body, such as the skeleton, at a time. The entire print in the movie only takes around two minutes.

The idea behind this scene in the movie is not too far-fetched and it features some technologies that are very similar to what is being developed today. The first thing the movie gets right about bio-printing is the fact that each body system is printed using a different tool. Today there are three main techniques used in bio-printing (ink-jet printing, laser printing, and extrusive printing) and each one has different strengths and weaknesses. Ink-jet based bio-printing uses “a “bio-ink,” made of cells and bio-materials, to print living cells in the form of droplets (each contains 10,000–30,000 cells) by using a non-contact

nozzle.”(Dababneh). Laser based bio-printing uses “a laser pulse to guide an individual cell from a source to a substrate.”(Dababneh) These two methods are fairly similar to traditional printing techniques used to put ink on paper. The last main technique used in bio-printing is extrusive based bio-printing, and it is very similar to current additive manufacturing processes used to make parts out of plastic or metal. Extrusion based printing uses “a combination of a fluid-dispensing system including a pneumatic or mechanical (piston or screw-driven) one and an automated robotic system for extrusion and writing.”(Dababneh). The second realistic element of the movie scene is the fact that it prints the skeleton first. This makes sense not only because it is the part of the body that is most central, but also because it provides a surface for the other tissues of the body to be printed onto. This technique follows the “traditional strategy of tissue engineering . . . [seeding] cells onto a scaffold, a solid support structure comprising an interconnected pore network.”(Dababneh) The last realistic element of the movie clips is the fact that the bone structures are printed in layers. Our current additive manufacturing techniques require use to print structures one layer at a time, although the layers used in the movie are much larger than the layers used today. A slight difference to current techniques found in the movie is the fact that currently we print in horizontal layers and the movie printed in vertical layers. Horizontal layers are used today so the structure does not have to fight against gravity while it is being constructed. This is not a problem for the people in the movie because they have a technology that allows them to suspend objects in midair, as illustrated by the raising of the gauntlet before the printing begins.
While the movie may get some of the general ideas of bio-printing right it gets a lot of the details wrong, or it utilizes technology that are impractical. The first, and most glaring flaw in the printing process used in the movie is the way they manufacture the skin for the new human. They bombard the skinless, but otherwise complete, body with “slightly greasy solar atoms forcing it to grow skin to protect itself.”(Besson & Ledoux, “The Fifth Element”) Even if “slightly greasy solar atoms” were a real thing, it would be much more practical to culture new skin from the existing cell and then graft it onto the body. The next flaw with the regenerative process in the movie is the amount of time the entire reconstruction took. In the movie it only took them two minutes to print an entire human being. Even if the physical printing process could happen that quickly the cells that are going to make up the person need to be grow and they need to be given time to grow together after they are printed. The third flaw in the movie process is the fact that they only use one cell to recreate an entire human being. Today when different organs are being bio-printed, they typically start from different cells that are similar to what they will end up reproducing. Another flaw in the way the human is printed in the movie is the fact that they never add any organs to the person. In the clip is shows the skeleton being printed, then the muscles, and finally the growing of the skin. The last flaw in the movie clip is the fact that no where is the physical shape of the person being printed programmed into the regeneration machine. This is important because even with the right materials to rebuild the person, the machine doesn't know how they are supposed to fit back together.
Overall I believe that the clip from the movie, The Fifth Element, provides a novel idea of where current technologies may end up some day.

If relevant technologies continue to develop at their current pace then I expect replacement bones and simple organs to be available within my lifetime, and I don't think we will be able to print an entire human for a long time after that, if ever. One major problem with printing an entire human I see is printing the brain. Not only is the structure of the brain complex, we currently do not know enough about how it works to be able to reproduce

it.