Nautilus
Nature Insight on biomaterials
Biomaterials research has come of age, write Nature journal editors Rosamund Daw and Stefano Tonzani in their introductory Editorial (Nature 462, 425; 2009, free to access online) to the latest Insight collection, Biomaterials. Since antiquity, the editors write, humans have been taking whatever substances are at hand — natural materials, glass, metals or polymers — and using them to replace body parts that have been damaged by disease or injury. But it is only recently, with the advent of molecular biology, that the field has become interdisciplinary, enabling materials scientists to design materials that impart a specific biological function. The