Marshall R. Urist and the discovery of bone morphogenetic proteins.

Over the last 40 years International Orthopaedics has published a series of articles on bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) covering topics from basic research to clinical applications. This includes also work submitted from the Laboratory for Mineralized Tissues of the School of Medicine University of Zagreb. Accordingly, we felt obliged to give a short summary of Dr. Urist's life and work as our gratitude to his discovery that demineralized bone matrix (DBM) activity induces bone when implanted ectopically into the muscle or under the skin due to bone inducing proteins, named BMPs.