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 Trans-lational 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.
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