I’m surprised that mammals evolved to not regrow teeth. You’d think it would be a significant advantage.
I wouldn’t imagine it’d play a role in reproducing though. It may help ones ability to live longer, but they have probably procreated long before tooth loss has become a major issue of well being or mortality.
It’s also only recently that we’ve been living for so long.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/longevity-throughout-history-2224054#toc-prehistoric-life-expectancy
this is misleading, the article starts by saying that life expectancy was 30-35 but then goes on to say that this is the average lifespan, which includes the fact that most people died in childhood.
When accounting for that, the average lifespan becomes at least 50 years old.
Most mammals instead evolved to have their teeth keep growing, like beavers, thus they need to keep using their teeth to keep them from growing out of control.
Secondly, humans in particular, added tooth-enamel-eating-bacteria into our diet hundreds of thousands of years ago. Before that, we didn’t have a huge number of issues with our teeth, and so perhaps not enough time has actually passed since we got the bacteria eats our teeth for an evolutionary advantage that stops it from being an issue? Evolution isn’t so cut and dry, it’s not like it’s trying to solve problems. People with resistances to mouth bacteria probably exist, but are they reproducing enough to become the dominant geneaology? Who the fuck knows?
They do exist, from memory they have another type of bacteria instead and there’s even a project trying to transfer it from people with it to people without it.
Also as you said evolution doesn’t try to fix stuff and there’s a whole lot of stuff that could have evolved for the better (heck, we’re not even that well adapted to be standing up!), but if it doesn’t prevent reproduction then it gets passed down.
If I remember this study it required a formulated liquid for “feeding” the good bacteria that kept away the bad bacteria. Not sure what came of it.
Edit: not the same. Getting my studies mixed up. This is the one I was thinking of, it’s a mouthwash to get rid of destructive bacteria.
The one I’m thinking about was in trial in a bio engineering community somewhere in Latin America (easy way to get financing, get people to pay to be your guinea pig)
Found it!
Why can’t we eliminate the bacteria?
That’s like asking why we can’t just eliminate gonorrhea… people keep inoculating each other with the bad shit.
I do tell my expecting parents (who happen to have bad teeth) that they should not test the food in their mouth and use the same spoon with their new child, as they will be passing on their bacteria to the kid. I do also imply they shouldn’t share things like drinks.
Whether or not they listen to me isn’t my problem…
It’s everywhere. You’d have to sterilize the entire planet.
Because then dentists would go out of business! 🙃
we sort of can, it’s called eating a better diet.
stop feeding the bacteria tons of sugar, start eating more chewy things that effectively brush your teeth as you eat them, and maybe even start chewing stuff like stalks of grass or twigs, that’s how a lot of people keep their teeth clean even today.
I wish I was a beaver or a rat, so I could be gnawing on everything and it wasn’t weird.
They last long enough if you only live to 35.
can we maybe not propagate misinformation? it was perfectly normal for hunter-gatherers to reach at least 50 years old, and if you think about it for a bit it makes sense that the age where we start to fall apart is about the oldest that people got to in the past, which is around 50-60 yrs.
the average lifespan in the past was something like 35, but that’s because tons of people died early on, which remained true up until the invention of modern medicine which was like 100 years ago and doesn’t really have anything to do with your diet.
Ah, my mistake. I was using the average age. Thanks.
For evolution to fix a problem that problem has to kill off everyone that isn’t immune to it before they can breed. If that doesn’t happen people with shitty teeth just keep getting born even if some have a mutation to regrow them.
Or at least space them out a bit. You get one set for the first 5-10 years, and then the second set has to last you the remaining 60-70.
Getting a new set at like 35-40 seems like a more sensible system to me.
Gotta be awkward at the office when Dave starts losing his baby teeth and has his midlife crisis at the same time
There didn’t used to be multivitamins. The broad spectrum of hominid diets never guaranteed you’d get enough trace minerals and elements to keep growing more teeth and there wasn’t evolutionary pressure to do so when you’re like five to ten years into your adult teeth when puberty hits.
mammal teeth work pretty well as long you don’t eat too much sugar and acids.
Anthropologists can look at a pile of skeletons and tell if it’s before or after processed sugar.
It’s our modern diet of refined sugar and plenty more that harms teeth
It’s somewhat within our control to do something about it
Haven’t evolved yet.
spoiler
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The redundancy is already there since we have 32 teeth to begin with. If you lose one or two it’s not really a big deal.
And there’s a fine line between helpful regrowth and cancer. the more regrowth there is, the more likelihood there is of cancer.
As I have had a really bad run of terrible dentist experiences, bridges are scary and implants are expensive, I’d really like this to work well, and be reasonably priced.
ETA Or, it could be my superhero origin story.
Likely prohibitively expensive, will take a long af time to reach wider markets and most likely never pass trials
All my predictions
Was my immediate thought when I first heard of this. It’s gonna be so damn expensive.
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You’re focusing on the above gum situation and not the underneath. Having a tooth that could grow and fill a void where an implant would not be successful is huge.
I had a really fantastic dentist. Spent some time kinda homeless/broken and now I have no clue where she went.
How close are we to growing teeth ANYWHERE we want on the body?
No more poop knife, you just bite it off.
„Eat shit” gets a new meaning
what’s a poop knife
Hazardous information warning
You already have taste buds there anyways
This is my teratoma, his name is Terry Toma.
Vagina dentata
You know it CAN be true someday
If we regrow teeth, we can regrow bone, muscle, and nerves. Almost immediately, that technology will be privatized and only the rich will be able to afford it.
Capitalism will say “Fuck you poors”.
How can I take this news and turn it into a class struggle?!
You know they are always thinking how they can use it to only benefit themselves. Don’t kid yourself on that, they’re leeches and this is their mentality
Yes, but they want money. So why deny us teeth when they can let us have teeth for money. They can make more selling it to millions of people then a few rich people.
I can’t say off the top of my head. Power tripping is the best first guess I have. I kinda equate it to anything that could help people live longer. Why don’t they give out insulin at better prices so people live longer and buy more stuff? That’s logically the smarter move, right?
Are you referring to the US? In the country I live insulin is available for free for those who need it.
Insurance is why. They can sell insulin at the prices they currently do, and still sell it to millions. Insurance companies can in turn charge more overall as well, pointing at the cost of insulin and the millions who need it as one of the reasons. So it is win win for both the buyer (Insurance) and the seller.
Happy countries who bear the cost of their peoples’ dental care out of a common bucket will potentially be happy with a way to invest in the future of peoples’ mouths and prevent all the ancillary costs that follow bad oral health.
good, the class struggle needs more awareness since it affects everyone.
wanting people to ignore the class struggle makes you something called “a massive asshat” and strongly implicates you as someone who benefits from the status quo.
You act like it’s a frantic reach to turn arbitrary news into a class struggle.
That a very pessimistic take
ofon life. I am sorry if life has been hard on you.It’s a very accurate one too.
How did you transmute a critique of capitalism into a critique of life?
When a non sequitor topic become the argument, When we are looking at the symptom instead of the disease.
Why should we even live? At the end of the day, capitalism will eat you. Fuck capitakisn.
I dont agree that the situation supports your train of logic, and I think you’re mischaracterising their comment. For example, there is nothing that includes “why should we even live?” in their comment
I would like a single example of capitalism not saying “Fuck you poors!”
Who asked? This is a tech community not a cry-about-capitalism community
Not being able to talk about capitalism in a tech community is like having a fishing community and not being able to talk about how the waters got shit in it.
Which country are you talking about? Most countries provide healthcare to poor people for free
Imagine getting new teeth but all of them are wisdom teeth.
Evolving to eat only salad
New dentally enforced diet.
finally
vegan eugenics
Important to note that the initial form of this treatment is to trigger the growth of teeth that failed to grow in the first place, at least last I read about it. An important first step, but for now it may be dependent on there being an existing “tooth bud” down in the jaw to get going.
I suspect that in the long run we’ll need to figure out how to implant a new tooth bud, probably made using the patient’s stem cells, to grow replacements for teeth that have been lost later in life.
Doing this from memory, but I think there was a paper a few years back proposing using stem cells in an implanted calcium lattice. Basically an artificial implant that would grow into an actual rooted tooth.
Would this work for microdontia? I have two front teeth that failed to grow to the proper size and one of them has a very small root, meaning a crown is not an option and I don’t want to get implants.
No idea, I’m just repeating caveats I’ve seen raised on this particular news before.
Ok but hear me out, what happens if you inject it into your feet?
If you don’t want to sleep in the next couple days, search for “Teratoma”
Teratoema.
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I’ve been wanting that since 1994. Jawsome!
Um, yes.
Probably be prohibitively expensive for anyone to do it as an elective procedure.
When I was young I was Tough and Ruthless. Now that I am old I am Rough and Toothless.
Jesus that makes me uncomfortable
Can’t quite place my tooth on why, but I get the feeling this might be one of those AI generated pics I hear so much about
This is going to be in fashion in a hundred years. Then with gold bling plates on the front.
Then it will go out of fashion again, and teeth will be the new tribal tattoo that people are stuck with, and the following generation will be all about smooth gums.
I hope they figure out how to 3d print gum tissue. Harvesting donor tissue from the roof of your mouth certainly works, but is probably the worst part of the recovery.
Seems like it should be doable. But I doubt it’s high on the list compared to kidneys, livers, etc.
Imagine junkies of this drug would look like tarkatans.
Dentata the movie in real life
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,” lead researcher Katsu Takahashi told Japanese newspaper The Mainichi.
“While there has been no treatment to date providing a permanent cure, we feel that people’s expectations for tooth growth are high.”
In 2021, his team discovered a gene – uterine sensitization-associated gene-1 (USAG-1) – that appeared to stop the production of additional teeth in mice.
Deactivating that same gene and stopping production of the protein it regulates has also caused other animals to grow lost, or even additional, teeth.
Takahashi and his team have spun up their own company called Toregem Biopharma to commercialize the USAG-1 drug, and hope to have it on the market by 2030.
While initial tests are mainly focused on congenital tooth loss, the team hopes teeth lost due to cavities, injury, and other accidents will be regrowable as well.
The original article contains 427 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
