Juan Garcia’s job isn’t like yours. As an associate professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, he’s in the business of anaplastology—the creation of prosthetics such as eyes, ears, and noses. As the name of his department suggests, the field is as much art as science, requiring a careful eye, a steady hand, and lots of patience.
In the past, Garcia looked at a form and sculpted it into a 3D object using wax and heated tools. From this, molds were made to cast the prosthetic device using silicone matched to the patient’s skin tone. But lately he’s been using a 3D printer to make patterns for body parts. Garcia uses a Printrbot Simple Metal to scan and print a mirror image of the unaffected side of a body, which he then duplicates into a wax pattern of the prosthetic device. Garcia then uses that to create a mold to cast the silicone part.
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