TAE: prophetic teenager

In high school, I had to write an essay about "anything" and make it sound convincing. I wrote that if you could make titanium into a foam, rather than a solid rod of metal, it would make a much more biocompatible implant. The bones around the implant would be less likely to degrade, I wrote. This was 1999. Fast forward 11 years:

Now Quadbeck and colleagues have created a titanium implant with a foam-like structure, inspired by the spongy nature of bone. The titanium foam does a better job than solid metal when it comes to matching the mechanical properties of bone, such as flexibility, and this encourages more effective bone regrowth.

What's more, the foam is porous, so the bone can grow around and within it, truly integrating the implant with the skeleton.

TAE posits that in another 11 years, this will be through clinical trials and be implanted in people. The caveat here, and the reason that the Wolverine reference is inane is that you can't get stronger than bone and be okay. The whole point of the titanium foam is to weaken the titanium down to bone strength so that the bone doesn't resorb and fail the implant. So you just aren't going to see Wolverine-people walking around with 200 lbs. of titanium infused into their bone structure...

TAE, prophetic twenty-something makes his next prediction: the next great advance will be when the titanium itself is made to go through resorption, so you effectively have a bone substitute...the bone then heals and grows into the titanium, then dissolves away the titanium and leaves behind new, flawless bone.

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