This edited volume is a marked exception to the generally held belief that workshop proceedings provide information of a review or overview nature and rarely address significant questions in an in-depth fashion. The editor, John E. Davies, of the Centre for Biomaterials at the University of Toronto, is to be congratulated for his unstinting efforts to provide a new "door" in biomaterials science.
As pointed out by David E Williams in the foreward to this volume, one of the central challenges in biomaterials science is the mechanistic explanation of the establishment of an interface between tissue and implant materials. The participants and contributors of the Bone-Biomaterial Interface Workshop, Toronto, Canada, December 3-4, 1990, and the authors and editor of this Proceedings, have indeed met this challenge head on and have provided a new foundation with various perspectives for understanding the interactions occurring at the bone-biomaterial interface.
The volume is conveniently divided into seven sections. Six of the sections deal with focal areas or topics related to different aspects of the bone-biomaterial interface, and the seventh section is a panel discussion on the industrial perception of the strategies in this area of health care. The six focal or topic areas are: The material surface (8 manuscripts), bone proteins and other macromolecules (5 manuscripts), cellular activity at the interface (10 manuscripts), the tissue-material interface (9 manuscripts), mechanical effects on interfacial biology (5 manuscripts), and retrieval analysis for interpreting interfacial phenomena (5 manuscripts). Overall, the volume contains 42 manuscripts provided by 139 contributors. The panel discussion involved 13 participants. The volume is a paradigm for those wishing to publish other workshop proceedings in the future. Following each manuscript, a discussion section with questions and answers is provided. The panel discussion on the industrial perception is also in a question/ answer format and addresses the following topics: Company involvement in biomaterials research, academic/industrial relationships and risk-taking, opportunities for multidisciplinary research, regulatory issues, and industrial participation in biomaterials meetings. The light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy photomicrographs are of the highest quality. The illustrations are produced in a readable fashion, which adds greatly to one's understanding of the information being presented. Finally, the 42 contributed papers provide 1403 references, an impressive number for those wishing to use this volume as a reference text.
The efforts by the editor are exemplified by the rarely seen in-text editing in both contributed chapters and workshop discussions. Also, the three final sections add to the overall completeness of the volume. These sections are the biographical sketches of invited attendees at the Bone-Biomaterial Interface Workshop, the affiliations with addresses of the contributing authors, and an exceptionally well-done index. The biographical sketches are noteworthy in that photographs of the invited speakers are included.