It's a shame Nature seems to keep these articles locked up forever. I found the first reference, which is a study from 2000, which is still paywalled and I can'

It's a shame Nature seems to keep these articles locked up forever. I found the first reference, which is a study from 2000, which is still paywalled and I can't read it. I'd be curious to know how state of the art has changed since this. I had a two level lumbar interbody fusion seven years ago, the procedure in which discs are removed and replaced by metal spacers that get seeded with a bone graft. Within about 18 months, you've got one solid bone. They seeded it with my own bone, sawed off of my pelvis, plus some kind of growth-stimulating protein. Beats me whether that was coral-derived or synthetic or what. I didn't think to ask. In any case, it certainly worked. It takes a while, but x-rays today look ridiculous. The bone is enormous, effectively growing around the original screws and rods that held everything in place while the bone was growing. I guess the scaffold matrix in me must have been of the coating variety. As far as I was told, the spacers were just the same titanium alloy as the screws and rods, which for some reason don't set off metal detectors, which makes me wonder why nobody makes knives and guns out of the same material. It'd be nice if they put a date on this page. The other references I could find were from 2011 and 1987.