A random thought I recently had was that the way so many different types of tribes and groups of ethnicities had come and gone and the many variations, combinations, and permutations of human body types should result with an extremely high probability that at some point in the history and evolution of the hominid species from the great apes to humans, there had to have been at least 1 tribe or group of human like creatures who grew to at least 8 feet tall.

My thinking process is that if we reverse the time scale back to our primitive ancestors, their lives were far more simple than ours. They didn’t have to worry about jobs, insurance, businesses, investing, school, etc. which we have to deal with in our modern life. What they had to worry about was what most social creatures had to worry about.

Food, water, access to mating partners, having healthy offspring, staying away from danger, staying alert, etc. These are the things they worried about. At this basic level, most hominid which started to walk upright probably developed the realization that being taller was better than being shorter. There is a clear advantage in reaching food in tall trees if one was taller. In addition, due to how body mass and volume increase at a cubic geometric rate in relation to height/ vertical increases, that meant that taller creatures would be literally bigger in size, due to correct proportions.

For many mammals, but especially primates, the male of the species is the larger of the two sexes as well as being stronger in terms of brute force. From what we learn in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, we can say that certain males were alpha and others were beta. I would propose that on average not only did alpha male humans have more testosterone, they were also bigger, specially taller. This meant that they had far more access to mating partners than beta partners. In this brutal sense, the genetically weak and who did not gain the genetic lottery had their genes weeded out of existence. If the practice continued over the subsequent generations, they offpsring in each new generation would get progressively slightly larger.

I am almost positive that in many ancient human societies and tribes, height was as prized and desired as today, if not more. It helped in the human to huma interactions as well as in fighting and sexual competition. I would say that in a synergically way eventually the females also started to choose the taller, bigger male. If this is the case, then we can probably say that in some smaller groups and tribes, where there was few viable options, many tribes people would choose to only mate with the biggest. This is what is known as intentional or selective breeding. Another term is eugenics.

If the ancient societies and tribes purposely pracices eugenics to have taller and more intimidating offspring, it would be over just a few centuries lead to some tribes being very tall in stature. However the thing that would probably cost these tribes is high levels of inbreeding cause from the desire to mate only with people of large sizes, which might mean there was only a few families who did carry such traits forcing them to mate within their own family to keep the genetic advantage, not realizing that they are actually hurting their genetic advantage.

We have many stories by naive americans and most societies in the world about groups of people who were true giants. There have been many skeleton unearthed in different regions of the world which show them being 8-10 feet tall. I suspect the stories about giants are true since it is extremely conceivable that there have been at least a few tribes which focused solely on gaining dominance by using selective breeding to gain the size they wanted.

One of the best examples is the story of the famous Irish giant from the 19th century. He had a pituitary problem causing him to be big but it turned out the pituitary condition had a genetic cause and it would turn out tow of his male cousins also developed overactive pituitaries causing them to swell up in size. If this was ancient times, certain females would choose only to mate with them, causing more pituitary giants and shifting the anthropomorphic measurements in a small town or tribe to completely shift. Another good example was that two of the 3 cases of giants who resulted from the lack of estrogen alpha and/ or beta receptors in their growth plates were the result of a consanguine union (cousin marrigage). The both would turn out to be sterile having extremely low levels of sperm count with almost everything else funcioning fine. If they had been also been non-sterile, their mating chances would increase by a lot in ancient times due to their size, and they would be selectively chosen to have more children than other men, even if they are resulted from consanguinity which should have hurt them genetically but didn’t, due to random chance.

So, just a food for thought.

The podcast series is coming along and this episode was to get out the message to people who might not have found out the website from searching or Google but through podcasts. It has a message which shows why I believe the venture and project to find a way to increase our height is a worthy goal.

Episode #4: Manifesto On Why Height Increase Is High Value And Worth Researching

I wanted to show that in terms of the businesses, ventures, projects, and ideas that are in the world today, few have the type of impact and can reach the type of basic and most universal level as trying to achieve the goal of becoming taller and bigger than who we are.

People always talk about growth in terms of the mental, emotional, spiritual, and financial but what about speaking about growth in the most basic level, the physical? Is not the desire to get slightly closer to the stars and heavens a part of man’s basic desires?

Normally I just wing it and speak from the mind but today I wanted to try something else and read out the entire episode from a transcript. I noticed that overall the speaking style was very rigid and non-fluid. Yikes! I’ve learned my mistakes and will avoid that awkwardness for future episodes.

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Note: For a transcript of the episode in PDF format, click HERE.

Length of time: 19 min

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In my searching for the right type of piezoelectric material to be added to the LSJL device, something else I found from the Wikipedia article on piezoelectric material was that piezoelectric materials have been used in surgery.

From the Wikipedia article…

Surgery

A recent application of piezoelectric ultrasound sources is piezoelectric surgery, also known as piezosurgery.^[34] Piezosurgery is a minimally invasive technique that aims to cut a target tissue with little damage to neighboring tissues. For example, Hoigne et al.^[35] reported its use in hand surgery for the cutting of bone, using frequencies in the range 25–29 kHz, causing microvibrations of 60–210 μm. It has the ability to cut mineralized tissue without cutting neurovascular tissue and other soft tissue, thereby maintaining a blood-free operating area, better visibility and greater precision.^[36]

Me: What this seems to suggest is that piezosurgery has been shown to be able to make very precise, small distractions in bones without effecting the muscles or blood vessels around it. At this point the idea is only a thought. However let’s see what other things we can find from google and PubMed…

From the Wikipedia article on Piezosurgery…

Piezoelectric surgery, or piezosurgery in short – is a process that utilizes piezoelectric vibrations in the application of cutting bone tissue. The process was developed by Tomaso Vercellotti ^[1] and has been patented.^[1] It is indicated for use in oral, maxillofacial, cranial and spinal procedures.

By adjusting the ultrasonic frequency of the device, it is possible to cut hard tissue while leaving soft tissue untouched by the process. The ultrasonic frequency is modulated from 10, 30, and 60 cycles/s (Hz) to 29 kHz. The low frequency enables cutting of mineralized structures, not soft tissue. Power can be adjusted from 2.8 to 16 W, with preset power settings for various types of bone density. The tip vibrates within a range of 60–200 µm, which allows clean cutting with precise incisions. A recent article on the topic of piezoelectricity has named Piezoelectric surgery as one of the most important applications of this concept, in addition to the trivial medical ultrasound imaging. ^[2]

Me: What we are seeing is what I speculated was possible after I did the research on the extracorporeal shock wave therapy. We saw that LIPUS (low intensity pulsed ultrasound) could lead to fracture healing, and that the ESWT has a potential to be better since the frequency was higher. This was what made me wonder what would happen to bone if we just increased further either the intensity (magnitude) or frequency in say sound waves or any type of device that can release vibrations at a high level. It seems that Piezosurgery is exactly what happens. The extremely high frequency of the surgery application causes bone material to easily break apart upon contact. The cuts made are very precise.

From one of the cited articles (source)….

Abstract

One of the most useful books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading was the “The Lean Startup “, by Eric Reiss. In the book, the main idea that Reiss expresses is that success of most startups depend on how well and how fast they can “pivot” in their evolution. Reiss’s book has been one of those business books that has come out in the last decade which has really changed the way many businesses and owners think about how the startup should work.

From the Wikipedia article on “The Lean Startup“…

• The Lean Startup relies on validated learning, scientific experimentation, and iterative product releases to shorten product development cycles, measure progress, and gain valuable customer feedback.^[1][2][4] In this way, companies, especially startups, can design their products or services to meet the demands of their customer base without requiring large amounts of initial funding or expensive product launches

• The lean startup philosophy is based on lean manufacturing, the streamlined production philosophy developed in the 1980s by Japanese auto manufacturers.^[13] The lean manufacturing system considers as waste the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer, and thus a target for elimination

• Ries’ lean startup philosophy seeks to eliminate wasteful practices and increase value producing practices during the product development phase so that startups can have better chances of success without requiring large amounts of outside funding, elaborate business plans, or the perfect product.

• Continuous deployment is a process “whereby all code that is written for an application is immediately deployed into production,” which results in a reduction of cycle times

• A pivot is a “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.

These are the basic ideas behind the philosophy. When I read the book, the main thing I took away from the work was this.

1. Focus on getting the product (article or post) out to the readers public as fast as possible and reduce the amount of time in trying to make them perfect. 

1. Get feedback from the readers on how they like the material I produce and adapt the material from their behavior and feedback. 

1. Move as quickly as possible, by changing the business operations, making the neccesary mistakes, correct them quickly, and then moving forward through continuous changes which allow the business or project to morph/ evolve as time moves forward. (ie “PIVOT”)

I’ve been crazy about physics for the longest time and my first choice for a major back in college was to study physics and then become a physicist. After my father rejected that idea because the field was too hard to go into with little financial gain, I eventually switched to Chemical Engineering. Fast forward almost 10 years now and I find that I am not using my Chemical Engineering degree at all in my business or work anymore. Maybe it might have been a better idea going back if I did decide on doing physics. Whatever happened, I always kept on studying as much physics as possible, and for almost all physics enthusiasts, we become inspired by the stories of our predecessors. One of the most brilliant and colorful physicists in the last century was the Caltech teacher Richard Feynman who is famous for his investigation on the Challenger disaster, his work in developing the original Atomic Bomb, and his famous lectures which are today integrated togther into a 3 volume series eloquently entitled “The Feynman Lectures On Physics“,  which was mostly written up and put together by his Caltech colleagues Leighton and Sands. This 3 volume collection is extremely famous among the physics community in how well and clear the ideas of basic physics is expressed and many physics majors and professionals go back to reading just these lectures to help them refresh their minds on some physics ideas. The books themselves are not that mathematically intense but in terms of helping the beginner student to grasp the conceptual understanding of the physics ideas at a deep level, it is definitely some of the best written texts on physics.

One of the happiest moments in my life involved reading his semi-autobiography, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman (Adventures Of A Curious Character)” where he talks about the events in his life. One of the most interesting for me was the story where he and his advisor at Princeton John Wheeler decided that he should give a presentation on their calculations and work on the idea of “….subject of advanced and retarded potentials in electromagnetism.  Feynman and his advisor John Wheeler had developed a theory of direct interaction (dispensing with classical fields) by using half advanced and half retarded potentials, similar to the theory developed by Dirac in 1938. (source)”. Suffice to say, I am in not position to give any type of judgement on his work since I never came even close to their level of sophistication. This was for Feynman’s first seminar.

Later on, Feynman learned that some incredible intellectuals would be showing up for his lecture including Einstein, Wigner, Pauli, and Von Neumann. These are giants in their field which have literally changed the human race. At the end of the presentation, the story goes, Pauli raised his objections to the proposed idea and Feynman wrote that years later it was found that his ideas for expressing advanced and retarded potentials in electromagnetism was proven wrong.

For me, when I first read that story, it taught me a very important lesson which I have always kept at the back of my mind. The lesson is this. Sometimes in our youthful exuberance we come up with flashes of insight and we develop a a lot of confidence in it’s utility and originally. We think we are so clever and smart in being able to come up with the idea. When we start to talk about the theory and promote it, we don’t realize from our peers and contemporaries, as well as mentors and teachers that what we think is a great idea has some major fundamental flaws which will be proved maybe years later to be wrong or ineffective.

It might turn out like the story of Feynman with his “advanced and retarded potentials” theory which had already been proposed by Einstein maybe 20 years beforehand, someone else before us who is more established with more experience has already thought of that idea, proposed it, and worked out the calculations and experiments, and have shown that it was ineffective. We in turn never hear about their failed attempts and go along with our ambition in trying to recreate this metaphorical wheel. This is part of life and we find out about our mistakes, and correct our behavior to avoid those mistakes for the future.

As I grow older and slightly wiser, I come to realize that most ventures in life end up in failure. Out of 100 business ideas, maybe only 2-3 will be profitable and have a real business model. Given also the elements of inexperience and over-abundance in energy fron youth, we over-estimate our own skills and think that the projects we undertake will take a short time that success will be easy to come by. We start businesses thinking we will change the world and becomes as rich as Bill Gates.

When this principle is applied to this project/ endeavor of height increase, I wanted to remind to the readers that we should always try to keep things in perspective and be realistic. People like Sky who worked on his microfracture idea for over 7 years, he was always saying that within 1 year he would find the solution. After multiple times of the same claim, eventually he dropped the project the EasyHeight.com website disappeared (except from the WayBack Machine).

My old collaborator to this project Kazlina expressed her opinion that we can realistically find a solution within 5 years if we really dedicate our energy and focus, I think she was being too optimistic in her guess. I would say that if we find enough breakthroughs and can get the government to loosen its regulation policies over the next 20 years in trying out our proposed ideas on human subjects who are willing, we probably will have a real viable height increase method within 30-40 years. That is my guess.

Working in industry and owning multiple businesses and having to constantly put out fires has taught me that we should NEVER forget Murphy’s Law. This means that anything that could go wrong will eventually go wrong. Life is hard to deal with and as time goes on, it gets harder or at least more complicated. Our carefree life with so much time in childhood gets filled up with adult responsibilities and obligations. And this is usually the real reason why people who were so passionate about growing taller when they were in their 20s give up on that “crazy dream” when they reach their 30s and later. Hell, some of these people even give up on the idea of lossing wight since that idea is also going to become very hard as we grow older.

When I wrote the piece where I said that we could build a LSJL device for around $600, I knew that the real cost was probably more like $1000-2000, if we take into account the possible problems and issues that come up. Very few ventures come out perfectly or right the first time we try it out. In some ways, failure is built into the very fabric of most human actions. If we were to quantify and measure our life and our output for productivity and efficiency we would realize that we fail probably 95% of the time and waste about 95% of the resources we are given. Most of us are very ineffective in our productivity.. This is why I also wanted to extend the time range for the completion of the LSJL device. I had stated before that it would take probably 2-3 weeks to finish building it, but after careful thinking, I would say that the more realistic idea is that it will take around 3-4 months to finish in actuality.

So in conclusion…”Realize that our ventures is probably not original, has already been tried before, will most likely fail, and will take far longer and cost more than we ever thought so in the beginning.” If we go through with building the LSJL device we must also be willing to accept the idea that just maybe it won’t work out and all of the optimism we had will disappear.

One of the most recent posts that I looked through entitled “Combining Growth Factors TGF-Beta1 And IGF-1 With Dynamic Deformational Loading On Chondrocyte Implanted Hydrogels” looked at the idea of combining the effects of a LSJL type device with the most well known growth factors we’ve looked at.

The real reason why I am still reserved about the LSJL method, at least in terms of the theory is because of how the force of the chondrocytes will have to be dispersed and diffused out in all 3 dimensions. The arguement made by Tyler about why the process of continuous MSCs differentiating into chondrocytes in the cavity of the epiphysis is that the chondrocytes in the epiphyseal plates are already strong enough to push apart the upper body of the body from the lower part of the body, assuming we are looking at growth plate cells in the legs. This is a rather good argument and does show that overall, the combined strength of the chondrocytes are strong enough to push against the weight of gravitational force pushing down. However, the cartilage is not completely surrounded by bone which is as strong as steel. It is only covered on the top and bottom by the bones but not on the sides. The sides are sovered by muscles, ligaments, and skin, all of which are far more elastic, stretchable, than the bones.

This is what lead to us looking at whether there are instances where growth plates were able to push past bone bridges which might develop from childhood injusries leading to fractures which lead to bone bridges which cover the gap/thickness of the cartilage/growth plate. So far there is evidence and cases where people’s growth plates did manage to still increase and overcome the resistance.

However, the LSJL is inducing chondrocytes inside a system that completely surrounds it. Every single side is covered in calcium fortified matrix strength material. Even if it was able to push at the bone, most loading forms, although mostly in the axial direction, lead to bone width increases, not lengthening. We saw in past posts like the one with the prepubertal, and post pubertal soccer female players that their cortical bones in terms of thickness increased. This is my real issue with the idea.

However the most recent post gave me another idea on how it might be possible to increase height. We remember from our elementary anatomy courses that places like the knee are held in structure by cartilage touching cartilage. The articular cartilage of the femoral head is rubbing against the articular cartilage of the tibial head. Just see the picture on the right.

If I was to take a guess from a engineering degrees of freedom/constraints point of view, the epiphysis being subjected to just LSJL will not really be able to increase in the axial longitudinal direction as much as that we wish for. This is from a series of layers covering the bone. The bone itself does want to grow if you give it a chance. The key is to remove the contraints. Let’s assume that the LSJL technique does work in leading to chondrogenesis through progenitor cells differentiating.

We can do the dynamic loading but it seems to make the bones thicker in width and cause it to loss it’s mechanosensitivity and becomes even harder, stronger, and thicker as according to the the consequences of Wolff’s Law.

My new proposed height incease idea is really just the addition of one new step in using all three steps of LSJL< chondrocyte implants, and growth factor injection. Those will all be done, but the step to add is to make a surgical incision into the cartilage through also across the initial bone layer into the inside of the bone.

There is two possibilites I propose.

• We either cut into the femoral head articular cartilage around it until we  make a complete closed pathway for the incision going all the way through to the bone’s inside. The direction will be from a top down approach, made on the transverse plane. We will make a complete loop on that transverse plane so that the cut will be completely encompass the bone’s head.

• We cut also another completely close pathway around the bone. The cut will go completely around  the bone in 360 degree fashion. The distracted opening is then filled with chondrocyte implants. The chondrocytes are doing two jobs. They are used to keep the two separate boen sides from fusing back together while also allowing for cartilage formation. The chondrocytes themselves are kept from ossifying using growth factors that promote only chondrogenesis like BMP-2, IGF-2, and chondromodulin. In the beginning we might just want to keept the open fracture open so we use just chondromodulin.

The other idea is that we combine the directions of incision of the two together so we don’t make a complete axial cut or complete radial cut. We do it as a skewed angle, effectively cut at the corner edges of the bone, right where the articular cartilage end on the tip of the bones. We cut completely past the articular cartilage layer, then cut through he first layer of bone, and reach the inside. The key is to make the cute complete in terms of pathway. It has to be a close pathway, thus allowing for the degree of freedom the original growth plate cartilage have, which is to expand up and down.

If we remember, the long bones are always going through the process of osteoblast bone cell formation and osteoclast bone cell removal. This means that the outerlayer of the bone is being continuously formed by the layer right below the periosteum. I imagine that the layer will act as the new rest zone of the growth plate. That layer has to be very proliferative and be differentiating at a high level to be the cause for the appositional growth of the periosteal layer.

The idea is to first make an incision deep enough into the outer edge of the edges of the long bone, past the layer which is growing, inject the chondrocytes embbeded in the hydrogels to keep the openings open, inject the growth factors so that the chondrocytes can form into cartilage, and then start the process of dynamic mechanical loading/ LSJL. We have already seen in a few past PubMed studies that LSJL on bones with growth plates clearly lead to increased longitudinal growth. In the process the layer that is underneath the periosteum is injected with certain growth factors that keeps it from turning into bone cells but only chondrocytes. Since the layer is already so close to the articular cartilage, they turn into cartilage rather easily. The lateral loading will only help turn more cells of this specific layer into resting zone type progenitor cells. As long as the distracted bone are in a closed loop around the bone, the cartilage that will be formed can be affected easily by the loading.