Three months later a colleague severed the ends of two fingers while feeding plastic into a packaging machine.

BBC: Hull-based company fined over worker's severed hand

He bought his daughter a fifty-cent plastic prize from a gumball-type machine.

NEWYORKER: The General��s Dilemma

In 1991 a boss decreed that Gruber couldn't buy a machine called an extruder, which turns plastic pellets into clear film.

FORBES: Shucking Petroleum

Lillehei solved that problem with cross-circulation, in which a donor, linked to the patient by plastic hose and a simple pump, acted as a living heart-lung machine.

FORBES: Brave heart

Also on view are four of his recent "Extrusion" benches, made without nuts and bolts by squeezing red-hot aluminum out of a machine as one might pinch toothpaste out of a plastic tube.

WSJ: In New York, the Work of Thomas Heatherwick

The operating room itself contained a maze of plastic piping that twisted though the air between the heart-and-lung machine and the operating table.

NEWYORKER: The Operator

Some of these are then fed into a prototyping machine, made by Objet of Israel, that can produce a 3-D model in lightweight plastic in minutes.

WSJ: Whirlpool Designer Patrick Schiavone | Creating