Fix fractured bones with silk screws

I will quote from the linked article on www.iflscience.com (be warned that iflscience stands for I F**king Love Science):

For bones to heal and bond, doctors have been screwing in metal alloys (the gold standard), but compared to the surrounding bone, they’re stiff and unyielding. The stiff implant ends up carrying most of the load, but bones don’t get stronger without physical stress. This phenomenon is called stress shielding, and over time, it leads to bone degradation. Additionally, metal increases infection risk, and its inability to degrade in the body usually means a second operation is needed to remove the pieces. Or worse, if the metal corrodes and has to be taken out before the fracture has even healed.

The article goes on to extol the virtues of silk as a material for medical implants:

Silk has a known low stiffness similar to that of bone -- but it’s tough enough to carve its own threads into bone as it’s screw in. According to Lin, silk materials maintain structural stability under very high temperatures, withstand extreme conditions, and can be readily sterilized.

...

Another advantage to silk: It can stabilize and deliver bioactive component, so these screws "could actually deliver antibiotics to prevent infection, pharmaceuticals to enhance bone regrowth and other therapeutics to support healing.

 Hopefully further tests will continue to show as much promise as the early results have shown.