The modern wedding: now exchange vows and bones

Say hello to the new bling: rings grown from bone cells taken
from your (still living) partner. "Biojewellery", which began as an
idea and then an experiment started in 2003, is coming to a ceremony near you.

The idea was started by an advert for volunteers to donate some
of their osteo-blasts-embryonic cells that prompt the building of bone through
our lives-in New Scientist and Bizarre magazines. The experiment to use those
to make "biojewellery" was launched in 2003 by Nikki Stott and Tobie
Kerridge, designers at the Royal College of Art, and Ian Thompson, a research
fellow in oral and maxillofacial surgery at King's College.

Donors have to have their wisdom teeth removed so that
osteoblasts can be extracted from their jawbone. Those are then grown on a Petri
dish and seeded onto a ring-shaped bioactive scaffold, which dissolves as the
new bone grows, replacing the porous ceramic ring.

Once that is done, the bone rings are taken to a design studio
and fixed to a metal band which can be personalized and shaped. The finished
product is a ring created from the donor's own bone tissue.

Biojewellery has sparked ethical questions that go beyond just
the use of public funds.

"In the first place, there might be a worry about the
propriety of causing unnecessary harm," says Iain Brassington, a lecturer
in bioethics from the University of Manchester who published a paper on
biojewellery in the Journal of Medical Ethics. "Surgery is harmful, and
normally we would want to be sure that the harm we're causing is warranted by
the benefit that we'd expect as a result."

Thus one of the criteria for applicants set by the biojewellery
team was to demonstrate that volunteers' wisdom teeth needed to be removed in
the first place. "It's the same process that dentists use normally,"
says Thompson. The risks to the donor are the same as those associated with
having a wisdom tooth pulled.

Kerridge says his team has no plans to develop biojewellery into
a commercial enterprise, but admits there is greater demand for the rings than
the scope of their project. Other teams could create biojewellery for about
£2,000 per couple, excluding the costs associated with the dental and design
facilities.

The only immediate development planned is in tissue engineering. Thompson
will use the bioactive ring as a base for growing larger structures by stacking
multiple cellular elements onto it, with the eventual aim of replicating the
shape of human bones for possible transplant.

Source: The Gaurdian