7. Grow an Entire Tooth
This might be the ultimate goal for science in the dental realm – to regrow an entire missing tooth. It has already been done in mice, but what it would require to be done in humans is rife with ethical and legal issues. Basically, the process involves the creation of a tooth primordium, which is a tooth in its earliest stage of development. After being created in a lab, the primordium would then be implanted into the jaw where a missing tooth once was.
The problem is that in order to make the primordium, scientists have to harvest stem cells from human embryos. Embryonic stem cells are the only ones that can make teeth; as adults those cells are missing.
It’s against the law (not to mention ethically murky) to harvest stem cells from embryos, so development of this technology is going to require a process that doesn’t involve embryos at all. Don’t hold your breath, but rest assured that scientists are chipping away at this problem as we speak.