Scientists Create Artificial Bones From Wood

steve_thatguy writes "According to Discovery News, Italian scientists have made artificial bone from wood. Created by blasting wood blocks with heat until they are nearly pure carbon then coating them with calcium, the scientists say the material allows bones to heal faster and more securely. Unlike titanium, the wood-based artificial bones flex slightly much like real bone, and the porous nature of the wood allows for better bio-activity with surrounding tissue. Though human testing is still likely years away, the material is currently being used successfully in sheep and may have other industrial applications."

Comments

Bones out of wood?

[oahazmatt]

Well that's not good. Now if they bleed they're going to attract ants.

Re:Bones out of wood?

[Anonymous Coward]

that would be like me saying your brain is made of retard, when in fact, retard is just the end result

Re:Bones out of wood?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And Christian fundamentalists. If you get enough of these bone replacements, they might start calling you a witch.

those poor chickens with boneless breasts

[goffster]

They now have hope

Re:those poor chickens with boneless breasts

[pavon]

I did my own experiment this weekend involving boneless chicken breasts sprinkled with calcium chloride, and placed over wood that had been previously heated in a vacuum till nearly carbon.

The scientific results were tasty.

Re:those poor chickens with boneless breasts

[swanzilla]

how humerus

Re:those poor chickens with boneless breasts

[bughunter]

I did the same, but I used sodium chloride, and included some wood chips soaked in dihydrogen monoxide. Somewhat tastier, despite the use of the Earth's most deadly chemical.

Re:those poor chickens with boneless breasts

[bughunter]

We chemistry nerds tend to party among ourselves. And we know all the best chemicals.

So yes, our parties are quite entertaining.

Plus, we like to blow shit up.

/hold my ethyl alcohol solution and watch this

Re:those poor chickens with boneless breasts

[NotBornYesterday]

I don't know if you were among this particular group of partying nerds, but I seem to remember a website from about 15 yrs ago, built by the faculty of the engineering department of some college. It showed pictures of their annual picnic. Every year, there was a contest to see who could get the briquettes ready the quickest. Year after year, they got more inventive, finally culminating when someone took 1) a grill filled with charcoal, 2) a lit cigarette at the bottom of the pile to act as a source of ignition, and 3) a bucket of liquid oxygen at the end of a long pole. The result (yes, there were pictures) was a 10-foot column of fire, and the total destruction of the el cheapo grill.

I wish I could find that website again. I wonder if they have beaten their old record. They must have by now.

Re:those poor chickens with boneless breasts

[thpr]

Purdue University http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLr_XrooLs

Sheep with wooden legs?

[mr_flea]

So... if they're giving sheep wooden legs... does that mean they're creating pirate sheep? Are they also giving them eye patches and pet parrots?

Re:Sheep with wooden legs?

[Anonymous Coward]

And here we have a very strange internet rule 34 confirmation.

Re:Sheep with wooden legs?

[sentientbeing]

Theyre enhancing sheep with charcoal bones to create legs of lamb that can BBQ themselves

mmmmhm

[nnnich]

let washington's dentist be chastised no more!

Prior art

[srussia]

I'll be claiming me mateys...arr!

Artificial bones in sheep?

[Sta7ic]

That's what I call some baaaahhhd medicine.

Wooden bone, punchline.

[HornWumpus]

Pinocchio: 'Who needs a girlfriend now that I have sandpaper.'

Re:Leave it to the Italians...

[snspdaarf]

AND mix in sheep. Urk.

Move Over Lee Majors

[bradorsomething]

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We can make him stronger... faster... using the latest in prefabrication materials from Home Depot. He is... the Sixty-Five Dollar Man.

Re:Been Doing This For Years

[ArsonSmith]

And putting it in sheep too right?

Steven Wright was right

[HTH NE1]

"I saw a man with a wooden leg, and a real foot." -- Steven Wright

Very old news...

[ak_hepcat]

Pirates have been replacing damaged or missing limbs with replacements made of wood for years!

Safer than Titaniam

[LionKimbro]

"Paradoxically, metal or ceramic implants meant to prevent bone breaks can sometimes cause them. Current implants are significantly harder than the bone that surrounds them. Natural bone can flex slightly. In fact, stress helps build stronger bones. However, the harder implants can apply so much stress to a particular area that the bone snaps. Softer wooden implants might cause fewer bone breaks."

Hm, this is like what I learned in Structures: or Why Things Don't Fall Down.

The author noted that insurance companies, finding a weak wall, would often over-retrofit it. Then the building collapses, becase the weight that would have been born by the wall is displaced onto the other walls.

He also wrote about the cult of metal. The only reason engines are made of metal, he explained, is because they have to contain very high temperatures. If it were not for that, they could be made far more efficiently with hoses and bladders. He challenged the readers to come up with ways to make things that are presently made out of metal out of other materials -- such as wood and bird feathers.

Re:Safer than Titaniam

[iroll]

Right. All levity aside, this could be a revolutionary medical step. Artificial bone is one of the most challenging materials science problems going, and has been for decades.

When an artificial hip, or other load-bearing bone implant, has a higher modulus than bone (and they invariably do), they cause the load to be transmitted unevenly to the bone. The artificial hip is on a pin that goes down into the marrow on the top of the femur. In natural loading, each segment of bone (taken from top to bottom) is loaded equally in compression. With an artificial hip implanted, some of the force is transmitted directly to a deeper part of the femur. The top of the bone is loaded less heavily than it would have been under natural circumstances?

Who cares? Your bones do. They're dynamic. When they're unloaded, they break down. So now, by unloading the top of the femur, you've given your body permission to dissolve it. Now your hip implant is bare, and only being held by its tip--fractures are the final result. This is why a hip replacement has a "lifespan" of only a few years--young people who have hips replaced have to go get new ones at some point, and have to lose a chunk of femur each time.

Things have probably improved since I was an engineering undergrad discussing these problems (~8 yrs ago), but those are the big issues. I'm going to be really curious to read more about this.

Re:Safer than Titaniam

[iroll]

My BS is Bioengineering (Materials), but I've been a physics teacher since I graduated, so I'm a little rusty. Take this with the requisite grain of salt =)

You're right, if you could just replace the whole femur, you'd eliminate the loading biocompatibility problems. The problem is that the femur as-a-whole is part of a complex and interconnected system, and would be many orders of magnitude more difficult to replace than the head alone. That tendons-and-cartilage problem is much, much harder than it sounds.

For starters, the top of the femur isn't connected to any muscles or ligaments, so we don't have to worry about reattaching them. Once the head of the femur is dislocated from the hip socket, the socket is replaced by a bioengineered version, and the top of the femur is cut off and replaced. The new ball/socket joint is reconnected, and the muscles naturally fold back around it.

Sounds simple, but this by itself is one of the most traumatic "routine" operations in the book. It's a massive, multi-hour undertaking, and requires a lot of blood and a lot of elbow grease. Removing the entire femur, while preserving all of the soft tissue around it, would be unimaginably difficult by comparison.

To replace the whole femur, all of the tendons and ligaments attached to the lower femur would have to be removed. Attaching them to a bioengineered substrate may be difficult or impossible. These aren't trivial connections, either. They're attached to the strongest muscles on your body, so they are subject to the most extreme forces in the body--hundreds if not thousands of PSI during heavy exertion (running, jumping, etc).

Titanium, in particular, would be a great candidate for a whole-bone replacement, if all it had to do was be a "mechanical" member. But getting the body to integrate with titanium--which you'd need, to keep those ligaments attached--is insidiously hard. One of the reasons why this new material is exciting is because the body integrates it much differently, by using it as a frame for normal growth (filling in the holes in the artificial bone with natural bone). Titanium is treated differently--the body effectively walls it off with a special type of soft tissue. It's "biocompatible" only in the sense that it doesn't provoke any kind of dangerous immune response; it is not a good substrate for normal tissue growth. Very, very few materials are, and most of them are highly engineered plastics with special protein coatings.

You also can't easily engineer a "half" replacement for the knee--knee replacements replace both sides of the joint. So, now you're chopping up the top of the tibia to provide a mate for your artificial femur. Which leads you right back to the same kind of problem.

Hip replacements used to be much worse than they are now; the mechanics have improved by leaps and bounds. They've gotten to the point where most people who need one (elderly, >60 yrs) will ONLY need one during their lives; it's younger athletes (Bo Jackson) and rheumatoid arthritis sufferers who have the bulk of their life ahead of them who are in danger of needing multiple rounds of replacement.

Perry Bible Fellowship Comic

[plisskin]

Yarrr!

http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF165-Yarteries.jpg

It's all fun and games...

[kuzb]

...until your first termite infestation :(

I think they mean charcoal.

[EWAdams]

When you take wood and heat it in such a way that almost only pure carbon is left, it's called charcoal. I bet they avoided that little term because it doesn't sound nearly as cool (or strong) as wood.

Re:SheepShit!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheep die at the slightest insult to their systems. A runny nose is a death sentence. I find it unbelievable that sheep are recuperating on their own with the assistance of some charcoal and calcium

Mint jelly and a roasting pan tend to be fatal as well.