Background Info

Okay, I started this blog a few weeks after we began team meetings, so I should probably tell you what you missed.

The first couple meetings we had, we just focused on the project.  If you haven't looked at my Body Forward link yet, here's another.  One of our team members brought in a page about bone substitutes at the second meeting, and we pretty much decided to go with that because one of them looked so weird: a bonelike material made from chemically altered rattan wood.  Yeah, wow.  Anyway, we looked at it and as well as being cool it looked like one of the best potential bone substitutes being researched.  Apparently it has already been used in sheep and their bones are fusing with it (that's a good thing).  GO SHEEPS!  Further research confirmed that these bones are indeed AWESOME, so that's probably going to be the basis for our project.  One of our ideas to develop this material is mass production: it takes two to three weeks for the rattan bone to be created, and that would be a long time to be sitting in the hospital with a shattered knee.  The most promising of these ideas so far has been to cut the bones out of blocks of the material (which, by the way, is called Hydroxyapatite) at the hospital based on scans of the patient's bone.  This could reduce the wait from a few weeks to a few hours.  Good news if your knee is shattered!