Almost 60 years ago, a chance meeting led to pioneering work that has improved medical care and seeded future innovations.

In the late 1960s, a young professor named Larry Hench traveled to a conference in Sagamore, N.Y., where he happened to sit next to a U.S. Army colonel who was interested in finding better ways to treat the battlefield wounds he was seeing in the Vietnam War. Their conversations led to the then-speculative topic of replacing bone with synthetic materials that the body would not reject. Returning to his laboratory, Hench eventually developed a calcium sodium phosphosilicate glass composition that had properties enabling it to bond tightly
with bone and stimulate the regeneration of damaged tissue.