Thursday, January 27, 2011

Do you want to live forever? If your answer is yes, pull your teeth out and save them. I am not being silly. People are having their dentists save their wisdom teeth as well as the baby teeth some still pull out with a string attached to the tooth and to the doorknob and with a good slam you have extracted a tooth the old fashioned way. Now, store these teeth for stem cells. Yes, the Bush era is over, research is in full swing and banks are getting deposits of teeth not money. Well, tooth banks.
Your dentist can now ship your teeth in a temperature controlled steel container to a lab in Massachusetts, where their stem cells will be spun out, frozen to more than 100 degrees below zero and stored. Why? In case you might need them for a future illness. All over the world and now in the United States, dentists are extracting baby teeth, wisdom teeth and even healthy adult teeth to spin out the stem cells in an effort to be used to regrow lost teeth, to be used to repair damaged bones, hearts, pancreases, muscles and brains.
Yes, soon we will not have to worry about our rotting bodies. We will have labs that are cultivating and storing disposable parts of our organs, bones and flesh. We will not be saying, “Honey, I’m bringing the car in for a tune-up.” we’ll be saying, “Honey, I’m going in for some new body parts; I’ve been drinking a lot lately, I think I’ll get a new liver I’ve been growing.”
The Director of the Regenerative Medicine Laboratory at Columbia University, Dr. Jeremy Mao, said, “I can’t help but feel excitement for their potential use in regenerating different tissues in the human body.” He is also the chief science adviser to StemSave, a New York City company that freezes the stem cells and stores them for later use.
WAIT! Don’t pull out all your teeth and race them to New York City even though you know you’ve been drinking too much (I need a new liver), eat salty foods(I need a new heart) played football too long(I need a new knee) sat in the son too much(I think I got skin cancer). There are concerns. It’s expensive, costing about $600 upfront plus $100 a year to store the stem cells from up to four teeth for up to 20 years. It’s speculative, with the first FDA-approved practical use of such stem cells years away.
The best part about the use of these stem cells is that researchers avoid involving human embryonic stem cells, which are controversial because their creation involves destroying human embryos.

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