Mark A. R. Kleiman: A vaccine against tooth decay?:
On Thursday, as I was leaving the UCLA dental clinic after having a crown re-cemented, I paused to read a research poster (whether student or faculty I couldn’t tell) about the prospects for developing a vaccine against dental caries (cavities). The poster claimed that vaccine development was technically feasible, though not likely to happen quickly, and that immunity was likely to be passed down from mother to child in breast milk, so that vaccinating one generation would protect future generations.
Where would I sign up?
[Introspect: what proportion of your lifetime income would you, personally, pay to never again have a filling, a crown, or a root canal, including the cost of the procedures themselves? A tenth of 1%? That is, if you expect your lifetime income-stream to average $50,000 a year, would you be willing to pay $500 a year of that to avoid all caries-related dental work? Surely not less, even if your teeth are much better than mine. I’d pay a couple of percent without thinking twice. Gross World Product is running about $50 trillion a year; a tenth of one percent of that is $50 billion. (Yes, I know the relevant number is personal income rather than gross product, but for back-of-the-envelope purposes we can ignore the difference.) What’s the value of a stream of benefits of $50 billion per year? Assuming a discount rate 10 points higher than the rate of growth of income, and a useful life of 20 years starting 10 years from now gives a present value of about $180 billion. Compared to numbers in that range, whatever we’d actually have to spend is rounding error.]
Next, they need to develop a way of tricking the body to grow teeth to replace lost of broken ones: imagine a broken tooth being simply removed while it’s identical replacement grows back in. This has a special place in my heart right now.