10 More Things You Didn't Know About Teeth

1. In 18th-century England, wealthy women might have opted for a tooth transplant, which was briefly popular among the upper classes.
2. No - really, honey, it was the dentist's fault: Such operations usually failed, and worse, the transplanted teeth often carried syphilis.
3. Teeth begin developing in utero at about six weeks. Long after birth, they retain many substances to which the fetus was exposed - and so offer a good record of the nutrition and environmental exposures of the child (and the mother).
4. Accordingly, MoBaTann, a tooth bank based in Norway, plans to collect 100,000 baby teeth to study the relationship between pollution and disease.
5. The stem cells that produce teeth can turn up in horrifyingly wrong places. Teeth have been known to form in tumors called teratomas, which may also include hair, bones, or other specialized tissue.
6. The earliest teeth may have appeared in the throats of jawless fish more than 500 million years ago. Like oral teeth, they crushed food as it was eaten.
7. Teeth can still be found in the throats of some fish species today, including cichlids in East Africa's Lake Malawi.
8. By studying these cichlids, scientists in Tennessee and Georgia have identified the master set of genes that regulate the construction of all teeth in the animal kingdom. The discovery could aid the effort to biologically engineer human teeth.
9. There have already been some remarkable feats of dental engineering. Last year a Mississippi woman became the first American to undergo osteo-odonto-keratopresthesis, a treatment for blindness caused by corneal damage. An extracted tooth is sculpted to form a frame for the tiny lens and is then implanted in the eye.
10. How could it be otherwise? The tooth of choice for the procedure: a canine, or eyetooth.

*Source: Discover Magazine