How A 3D printer Gave A Teenage Bomb Victim A New Arm – And A Reason To Live

When Mick Ebeling read about a boy in South Sudan who had lost his arms, he set off with a 3D printer to make him a prosthetic limb. Now the project is bringing hope to the country's other 50,000-plus amputees

In warring South Sudan, you must trade your limbs for your life. At least, this was the reality for Daniel Omar, who in March 2012, at the age of 14, embraced a tree trunk to shield himself from a bomb's blow, and stepped away without his hands. Aware of the burden he would place on his family, in 2012 Omar told a Time reporter that he would rather have died when the government's Antonov aircraft dropped its lethal cargo.

Seeing this declaration on paper shocked Mick Ebeling, who was then several thousand miles away in Los Angeles. The Californian is the founder of an American startup called Not Impossible Labs, an organisation that builds open-access devices to assist people facing seemingly insurmountable physical challenges. "I've got three little boys," says Ebeling. "It was hard for me to read a story about a young boy who had lost his arms."