REGENERATIVE medicine is a field with big ambitions. It hopes, one day, to repair or replace worn-out hearts, livers, kidneys and other vital organs. Many people, though, would settle for a humbler repair—of their teeth.Dentistry has too much “drill and fill”, cutting away infected tissue and replacing it with alien, artificial materials. But if work by people such as David Mooney of Harvard University comes to fruition, the days of drill and fill may be numbered. For, as they report in Science Translational Medicine, Dr Mooney and his team have found a surprising way to get dentine, the tissue that underlies a tooth’s enamel coat, to repair itself. They do so by shining a laser beam at it.Regenerative medicine boils down to the intelligent manipulation of stem cells. A stem cell is one that has the capacity to split asymmetrically so that one daughter remains a stem cell (and can thus go on to perform the same trick) while the other gives birth to a line which proliferates and differentiates into many other sorts of cell. The most famous, and controversial, stem cells are those in early...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1ivv8hr
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