1. ‘Trabecular’ bone formation by osteoblasts from rat long bones (28 days)
2 mm

2. ‘Trabecular’ bone formation by osteoblasts from rat long bones (28 days)
0.5 mm
I started out at the Hammersmith working on calcitonin and related peptides - inhibitors of bone resorption. I began as a postdoc at the time when Tim Chambers, Alan Boyde and Sheila Jones had just developed simple methods for studying the function of osteoclasts in tissue culture. Tim Chambers group had just shown that calcitonin was an extraordinarily potent inhibitor of the mammalian osteoclasts - both cell motility and resorption pit formation in bone slices
In attempting to get this system working for myself I made the surprising discovery that osteoclasts were only stimulated to form pits when the pH of the medium was reduced. So I quickly became interested in the question of osteoclast activation.
0.5 mm
0.5 mm