A Smile for Bile:  Science Photo Library/Photo Researchers; © Thomas J. Peterson/Getty Images; iStock
The ancient Greeks thought an excess of bile could make you angry or melancholy, but Julian Zhu thinks the digestive juice could improve your smile. Zhu, a chemist at the University of Montreal, hit upon the idea while developing a bile-acid-based gel for tissue repair. He found that combining modified bile acids with silica created a hard plastic—perfect for patching broken pearly whites. The bile plastic matches the durability of plastic composite fillings and is more resistant to cracks. And it doesn’t leach mercury, as many commonly used metal fillings do. Bile occurs naturally in the body, so it wouldn’t cause any harm if the fillings were to decompose over time.

Zhu hopes to have his fillings through clinical trials and into dentists’ offices by 2014. Some people might squirm at the notion of having teeth made of intestinal by-products, “but everybody has bile in their body,” Zhu points out. “Is it really grosser than putting mercury in your mouth?”

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4 Comments

Great idea, hope it works and we see it available soon!
It is high time for more biocomatible dental materials and more health responsible dentistry. Currently denstistry is way behind in this . It is focused on cosmetics and still putting toxic materials and chemicals in our bodies which are causing health problems down the road and allergies for millions of people!

Well that is neat but what good is it if they are pricing themselves out of a market?
The mother of all of inventions is the need for necessity.

Piss on the FDA, I want these filling NOW! Far better than the poisonous mercury crap that's currently in my mouth.

Well you can’t argue with the results but I think if they want to convince anyone to put this concoction into their mouths - and keep it there, for years - they’ll need to do some quick thinking on coming up for a better word than ‘bile’ to describe one of it’s main components. I’m not squeamish and I know science looks to all areas of nature for solutions to problems but I’m pretty sure to the housewives and teenagers selling bile will be tough!

www.smile-lincs.co.uk


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