From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: 3D Printing Description: Audio Interview by GAO staff with Timothy Persons, Chief Scientist Related GAO Work: GAO-15-505SP: Highlights of a Forum: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Implications of Additive Manufacturing Released: June 2015 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's June 2015. 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, has the potential to fundamentally change how goods are produced and distributed in medical, aerospace, defense, and other sectors. GAO recently held a comptroller general forum to discuss opportunities and challenges related to 3-D printing. GAO's Jacques Arsenault sat down with Tim Persons, GAO's Chief Scientist, to discuss highlights of the forum. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] 3-D printing is something that's come up a lot in the media lately. Can you talk a little bit about what it is; why GAO held a forum on the topic? [ Tim Persons: ] There's more to 3-D printing than just the printed gun, which made a lot of the headlines and things. There’s a lot of profound implications on this. And of course, one of the things that GAO does is foresight, like analyses, in this particular case for science and technology issues. And all technologies are neutral in that they present both opportunities and challenges. And so the goal of the forum was to explore—what are the opportunities that could be pursued and yet the challenges which might be faced with that. Additive manufacturing or 3-D printing itself is just really a layer-by-layer way of constructing or building something as opposed to the older or well-known subtractive technique, when you think about putting a block of wood in the wood shop and you have to sort of chisel it or cut it away and things like that. Additive manufacturing or 3-D printing could have disruptive effects on the manufacturing and distribution of goods, so we really wanted to unpack that and explore that. So there's a lot of profound implications with this in terms of the shift from this technology out of the prototyping engineering world into actually producing end user parts. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So can you talk about some of those opportunities? What are some of the ways or sectors in which this technology seems poised to make a big difference? [ Tim Persons: ] Right. So there are several sectors where it's already making an impact and we think they'll be impacts beyond. One of the things is in the medical sector where you can have highly customized parts--think, for example, for hearing aids or even prosthetics. And even looking into the future in the medical domain, the printing—bio-printing of human organs, ethically done of course. But there’s also other areas such as the aerospace industry and just producing parts that are lighter weight and yet they're higher performing or they are designed to be. And that can translate into millions of dollars of savings a year for a commercial airline. And then even looking farther afield is in the retail area. There is potential simplification of the supply chain so instead of having your goods have to be shipped around on the interstate, let's say, with lots of trucks, you could print things in the back of the store after you order them to your custom specifications. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] And how about some of the challenges that this technology presents? [ Tim Persons: ] So our experts told us the key challenges among them are-- the first is just ensuring product quality. It's a relatively-- 3-D printing systems are relatively nascent. They're newer so right now if you hit the print button and build the same part and print again, you may not get exactly the same part in exactly the same way that a lot of fields and applications demand you must get. So, there is right now just a fundamental issue of ensuring product quality and getting the same thing-- repeatability is what they call it. The other thing is just creating the right tools for design of these systems. When you start thinking about building something, just the design of them, using current computer-assisted drawing or CAD systems are insufficient to incorporate the ideas of what you could do with many materials and all the highly complex customized things that you can do with 3-D printing. And then a third challenge is just the expansion of the library, if you will, or the array of materials that can be used. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then what are some of the policy considerations; the things that policymakers should be looking at with this technology now and in the near future? [ Tim Persons: ] So one of the things that the-- our national leaders could consider on this is just the idea, the need to develop and apply industrial standards. These are very important to develop and then apply across the industry to get a sense for-- if I print some part, particularly for use by a person or directly produce for them, that they get the quality that they need, particularly in life saving or life security applications. The other thing is to-- just the lead in deployment and use of 3-D printed parts and systems which is what's going on in our Department of Defense and bases in Afghanistan as well as our space community, if you think about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA to be able to print these things on, let's say, the International Space Station. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] And then finally, what would you say was the bottom line of this forum? [ Tim Persons: ] The bottom line is that even though 3-D printing is only decades old, it has significant potential. It's difficult to compare 3-D printing to the centuries that we've had in the subtractive mode of manufacturing. We are very good at that. But there's a lot of room to grow in this area. But 3-D printing has profound implications potentially on many of these things, again, from retail to aerospace to biomedical systems. And so this is just worthy of continuing to keep an eye on and exploring and thinking about what this may do, particularly in today's innovation-centered economy. [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.