wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

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Helene Meyer Tvinnereim and a team of Norwegian scientists are collecting milk teeth from 100,000 kids to create what may be the world’s largest tooth bank. A dental biomaterials researcher at U Bergen in Norway, Tvinnereim seeks to find links between diseases and prenatal/childhood exposure to chemicals. The normally discarded teeth function as a ‘black-box’ recording of the chemicals children are exposed to, and have excellent shelf-life when dried and stored. Of course, this is a lot easier to do when you have a streamlined national health-care and record keeping system..