I think at this point there is a very large amount of evidence that shows that if there is one leading researcher or scientist which can help our cause and give us a lot of assistance and guide to create an alternative way to increase height after growth plate closure, it would be Dr. Carl Brighton from the University of Pennsylvania. Through out my research, I’ve come across this guy at least 4 times now and this latest one shows that he seems to have had an influence on most of the ideas we have looked into (if only superficially so far).

When I was doing research to find the type of piezoelectric material we could put on the loading device to be built, I decided to review my material science knowledge on piezoelectric materials.

As for my educational background, I have a degree in Chemical Engineering with a focus on Material Science And Physics. I took one class where a considerable amount of homework problem sets were focused on doing piezoelectric calculations. Unfortunately I threw away the textbook after the class was over. I had taken the advanced undergraduate class in E & M (Electricity and Magnetism) using the Maxwell Equations with the classic textbook written by Griffiths (3rd ed.) and also glanced through the Berkeley textbook by Purcell and have looked through Feynman’s lecture books as well. I have seen this stuff before.

When I was looking through the Wikipedia article on Piezoelectric Materials there was a subsection dedicated to just Bones, specifically dry bones. I’ll post it below…

Bone

Dry bone exhibits some piezoelectric properties. Studies of Fukada et al. showed that these are not due to the apatite crystals, which are centrosymmetric, thus non-piezoelectric, but due to collagen. Collagen exhibits the polar uniaxial orientation of molecular dipoles in its structure and can be considered as bioelectret, a sort of dielectric material exhibiting quasipermanent space charge and dipolar charge. Potentials are thought to occur when a number of collagen molecules are stressed in the same way displacing significant numbers of the charge carriers from the inside to the surface of the specimen. Piezoelectricity of single individual collagen fibrils was measured using piezoresponse force microscopy, and it was shown that collagen fibrils behave predominantly as shear piezoelectric materials.^[15]

The piezoelectric effect is generally thought to act as a biological force sensor.^[16][17] This effect was exploited by research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which established that sustained application of electrical potential could stimulate both resorption and growth (depending on the polarity) of bone in-vivo.^[18] Further studies in the 1990s provided the mathematical equation to confirm long bone wave propagation as to that of hexagonal (Class 6) crystals.^[19]

Me: There was one key phrase that really got me interested in seeing what researchers have found and it was the highlighted one above. This citation, #18, reveals that it was written by Brighton…. What we may need to do right now like detectives is try to track down these papers, get them, and see what is inside them. Tyler’s idea behind the potential inducing from fluid flow idea for LSJL comes directly from these findings from more than 30 years ago.

^ Pollack, S.R, Korostoff, E., Starkebaum, W. y Lannicone, W (1979). “Micro-electrical studies of stress-generated potentials in bone“. In Brighton, C.T., Black, J. and Pollack, S.R.. Electrical Properties of Bone

So I tracked down this paper from PubMed records. This is the link I found. (SOURCE). It seems that the name of the paper is DIFFERENT. It might not even be the same paper since it is missing one of the authors, someone named Lannicone.

J Biomed Mater Res. 1979 Sep;13(5):729-51.

Microelectrode studies of stress-generated potentials in four-point bending of bone.