YOU CAN HAVE FOR A QUARTER WHAT HE';D SELL OUR NATIONAL SOUL FOR?:

Baby teeth provide life-giving stem cells (Ben Sandilands, 04.12.04, NZ Herald)

In future, children will not be putting their early teeth aside for the tooth fairy to collect, but putting them instead into a stem cell bank.

Rather than being rewarded with a coin, stem cells within the tooth will be stored to cure them of some of the deadliest afflictions they might suffer half a century later.

"Parents will want to store the stem cells found in the pulp inside these juvenile teeth in liquid nitrogen" says Dr Stan Gronthos, a haematologist at the Hanson Institute in Adelaide, South Australia. "That way they could be used to grow new teeth and perhaps even cure neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease."

He predicts they will become effective for growing replacement brain tissue to overcome stroke damage as well as basal cell degradation linked with Parkinson's.

Reached for comment, Michael J. Fox asked: "Why wait for the teeth to fall out when you can frappe the embryos?"

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 3, 2004 7:40 PM