"I can't understand how people are still working on growth. That stuff's all done." This was the beginning of the first lunch conversation at a recent Banff workshop on Mathematical Foundations on Mechanical Biology... somewhat frustrating for someone who is excited about growth. Fortunately, most of the presentations and discussions still focused on growth. Although "that stuff's all done".

Would anybody claim that plasticity was all done when Richard von Mises published his milestone work in 1913? Or was it all done when Geoffrey Ingram Taylor contributed his famous monograph on crystal plasticity in 1938? Or was it all done when Ekkehard Kröner introduced the concept of dislocations to explain the mechanistic origin of plastic slip in 1958? Or was it only all done when Juan Simo made it computationally manageable in 1985?

In a way, growth is like plasticity. It has its von Mises in Julius Wolff and D'Arcy Thompson, its Kröners in Steven Cowin and Dennis Carter, and its Simos in Rik Huiskes, Anne Hoger, Larry Taber, and Jay Humphrey. But... does that mean that "that stuff's all done"?