You jest, but this is not the first time a 3D printed tumor has allowed for doctors to better solve the problem:

"Man Saves Wife’s Sight by 3D Printing Her Tumor.

When his wife was misdiagnosed, Michael Balzer used 3D printing and imaging to get her well"

http://makezine.com/magazine/hands-on-health-care/

With your own health data and access becoming easier to revolutionary medical advancements, you should expect to see more stories like this. You are your own best health advocate, and your time is worth more than a single doctor's experience. You can dig longer and further than someone who needs to get you in and out in 15-30 minutes.

EDIT: A good example is my wife's endometriosis. There is no cure, just treatment. I'm working on a non-profit program to have genetic testing done for volunteers to isolate the parts of the genome responsible for endometriosis (statistical analysis; just like 23andme does) so that research can move to removing the responsible genome section using the recently discovered CRISPR protocol: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-crispr-technology-precise-genet...

My girlfriend is basing her entire PhD around spatial modeling of tumors. It's not as simple as you would expect. She's actually working in a physics lab despite being in a bioinformatics program because the PI is focused on material packing research. Turns out physics does impact cancer!

Understanding how cells and populations of cells grow, from a 3 dimensional and spatial perspective, is a fundamental step in understanding our biology because it's research rooted in math and the real world. What do cells actually, physically look like, and how do they interact? These are questions biologists barely have the answers to, if they have them at all, and only recently have we unlocked the ability to try to answer them. Cancer research is a main beneficiary of super computing because it allows us to build simulations much closer to reality than we previously could.

Don't take the ability to 3d print a tumor for granted!

Tumors are also, sadly, the less scary subcase of cancer. Single tumors can be targeted, shrunk, and often taken out. It's the undetectable "lucky" cells that might survive chemo and radiation that make the disease so hard to fight (because, as with antibiotic resistance, they've now been selected for resistance to the drugs/radiation).

If you are pointing out how university news departments are hype machines, you are right. I've seen that this is particularly true of MIT. I don't track these things, but I've seen too many over-hyped research stories coming out of MIT news and Tech Review. Granted, they're not the same organizations, but somehow they both have this common trait.

yes - this is the kind of BS that I alluded to because he is working with Neri Oxman.

Neri is an architect who says her work is 'biologically inspired'. BS Central.