Tooth repair with the natural materials of the teeth will allow rebuilding teeth damaged by decay.

"What we're hoping to have happen is to catch [decaying teeth] early and remineralize them," said Sally Marshall, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco. Marshall gave a talk last week at the spring meeting of the Materials Research Society on rebuilding the inner portions of teeth.

While regrowing your uncle's toothless grin from scratch is still a decade away, the ability to use some of the body's own building materials for oral repair would be a boon to dentists, who have been fixing cavities with metal fillings since the 1840s.

Marshall thinks she's just a few years away from knowing how to restore dentin. Give the ability to restore dentin and enamel conventional fillings will become obsolete.

Some skeptics of the prospects for radical life extension see body rejuvenation as a very distant prospect. Yet a method to restore dentin and enamel is a form of rejuvenation. Granted this rejuvenation is only done to teeth. But teeth are a part of the body. So rejuvenation therapy to one part of the body is just a few years away.