By Jackie Rocheleau, Illustration: Amanda Northrop/Getty Images/Vox, January 27, 2022
Erin Dunn gets baby teeth in the mail, sent by volunteers from across New England. Each tooth arrives at her lab in a tube packed with fluffy cotton balls, usually clean but sometimes flecked with dried blood. Dunn, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who brands herself as “the science tooth fairy” to appeal to kids and encourage them to donate their baby teeth for a scientific study, then hands them over to Felicitas Bidlack, a specialist in tooth development at the Forsyth Institute, an oral health research center.
Bidlack inspects each one, noting any coloring, grooves, chips or cracks. She uses X-rays and CT scans to look inside their layers to measure enamel thickness, mineral density, and other characteristics before she slices each one.
Anthropological studies have shown connections between tooth growth patterns and physical stressors such as illnesses or injuries, and a few studies in the life sciences have shown that traces of toxins or pesticides can embed in baby teeth, which could make teeth useful biomarkers for assessing harmful exposures during childhood.
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