Why Titanium Bonds With Bone: The Rabbit Accident

Gösta Larsson was born with a deformed jaw. No lower teeth. His whole life, eating hurt, and it was difficult to speak. By 1965, he was a grown man in Sweden, and medicine had nothing to offer him.

 

Then he found his way to a doctor in Gothenburg with a strange idea. To understand that idea, you have to go back thirteen years, to a rabbit.

 

In 1952, Per-Ingvar Brånemark was a young doctor studying how bone heals. He put a small titanium tube into the leg bone of a rabbit, with a tiny microscope inside, so he could watch blood move through the living bone. 

 

When the study ended, he tried to take the tube out… but it wouldn't budge. 

 

The bone had grown onto the titanium and locked it in place. This wasn't supposed to happen. Every doctor knew the body fights any foreign invaders. This rabbit's body had done the opposite. It had accepted the metal as bone.

 

 

The bone fuses right next to the metal implant with no gaps between

 

Brånemark saw what it could mean. If bone bonds to titanium, you could anchor new teeth into a jaw, hips, and knees. But almost no one believed him. He asked for research money, and year after year, and was told no. The idea went against everything medicine at the time, and to prove titanium was safe, he needed twenty volunteers from his own lab to let him place small pieces in their arms. The experiments were successful, yet they still doubted him. 

 

Then Larsson arrived and volunteered to be the first with a full implant. Brånemark placed four titanium posts into his jaw and fastened a new set of teeth to them. And then they waited to see if his body would push the metal out. It never did. The posts held through forty years, through meals and conversations, and they were still holding the day Larsson died as an old man.

 

Today, millions of people have titanium in their jaws, hips, knees, and spines. If someone you know has a dental implant or a new hip, this is the story of how it got there. It took one doctor who trusted what he saw over what he was told, and one man willing to go first.

 

Titanium femur for a hip replacement

 

One of our pens is machined from titanium. It’s an honour to think these materials are used to save people’s lives.