Most babies born in 1900 died before the age of 50; 100 years later life expectancy in the UK now exceeds 80 years, with the number of over-65s expected to double by 2030. This trend is radically changing the age demographics of the population and creating a new set of challenges for engineers. One of the most significant of these is to give people a higher quality of life in their old age. Significant progress has been made; 300,000 hip replacements are now performed annually worldwide, releasing people from pain, and extending the active period of their lives by 20 years or more. The success of these implants has led scientists to develop a new type of biomaterial that is promising to do for medicine what silicon did for computing. Historically the function of biomaterials has been to replace diseased or damaged tissues. These biomaterials were selected to be as inert as possible while fulfilling mechanical roles such as teeth filling and hip replacement. Metals such as titanium and mercury amalgam have been remarkably successful in repairing hard tissues like bones and teeth respectively because they are chemically inert and so don’t decay inside the body, and are strong enough to last tens of years. Applying this approach to softer tissues has proved less easy because designing soft materials with the required flexibility that can also maintain their integrity is tricky. The proposed solution is to create implants that grow and repair themselves.

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