Dentistry: Does A New Class Of Glassy Gel Have A Place In It?

While British naval captain James Cook was navigating and exploring the Pacific Ocean, this midpoint of the Age of Reason had dentistry too, begin to radically reorienting itself.

It was a world that was setting new standards.

With Cook, the accuracy of his surveys and extensive geographical knowledge come first to mind for most; how controversial a figure he has become is all part of the territory. Overlaying contemporary values to other times creates a challenging perspective that by its very nature is subjective. Here we stand surrounded by the most knowledge, exponential exotechnology, and global interconnectedness like never before, looking into a past where even 60 years ago is largely unrecognisable. And from this vantage point, still there are lives deemed far more valuable than others, countries designated more important, we bomb and blow each other up, continue treating an ailing planet as if its disposable and classify none of this as barbaric.

As always, any, all and every transgression is exculpated under the banner of ‘progress’.

To broach the question of whether or not there was goodness in the man James Cook is much like asking the same of water: much, if you’re in a desert; none if you’re drowning. He was indeed a flawed human, who outlived all six of his children and suffered failing health.

In Reports from a Wild Country (2004) one of the most significant figures in the emergence of the environmental humanities, the late anthropologist Debra Bird Rose states, “Captain Cook was the real wild one. He failed to recognise law, destroyed people and country, lived by damage and promoted cruelty.”

A powerful statement completely undenied, there was broad influence his voyages gave to new disciplines in astronomy, natural history, oceanography, ethnology, anthropology, dentistry and philology.

Except for the 1770 Endeavour’s disastrous stay in Batavia (now Jakarta) when 30 to 40 crew died of malaria and dysentery, there were few deaths from natural causes, and no recorded deaths from scurvy on any of Cook’s expeditions. Not because he’d cured it, but because he applied all the suggested measures of cleanliness and ventilation to crew quarters. It was not uncommon for a ship to lose half her crew to scurvy since the body stores only about 6 week’s worth of vitamin C and voyages routinely exceeded that by (nautical) miles. Cook carried a variety of experimental foods, and insisted those onboard have things such as sauerkraut, malt wort, cress, and a type of orange extract included in their diet.

It was this pragmatic approach to materials and practices that set new standards and lead to vastly improved health; just as dentistry was achieving at the time – it too, often borrowing from unrelated fields.

By the time Cook had been stabbed in the neck on the Hawaiian beach of Kealakekua Bay just three months shy of his 51st birthday, the synthesis of nitrous oxide was celebrating its seventh. It would take another two decades for 20-year-old English chemist Humphry Davy to inhale it, and just for laughs, party on with doctors, playwrights, scientists, dentists and poets and anyone wanting a puff from his green silk bag.

All in the name of experimentation.

Forty-five years later at a gathering of recreational users, US dentist Horace Wells noticed that someone had quite substantially injured themselves, felt no pain, and decided to try it on himself while having a tooth removed.

Like many good ideas that come from being out of it at a party, it worked well for him, then was an unmitigated disaster when he publicly demonstrated it. The dosage was wrong, the patient screamed during the extraction and laughing gas was declared a joke.

It was a failure that did, however, lead to the discovery of ether which was like a lightning strike in the accomplishments of anaesthesia.

Unfortunately, Wells’ reputation never recovered from the humiliation and three years later in 1848, he took his own life at the age of 33. In the ensuing century, advances in equipment, techniques, materials and pain management followed one another in quick succession. Since 1880, dentistry materials have evolved from glass ceramic inlays to porcelain, alginate impressions, zirconia and now CEREC; with nitrous oxide in common use as an inhalation anxiolytic since the 1950s.

Rather a case of glassy-eyed, than glassy gelled.

This new material is a discovery by researchers at North Carolina State University. Student Meixiang Wang was experimenting with ionic liquids (ILs) – the salts in liquids that remain solid at room temperature and melt only at extremely high heat. During his experiments, Wang kept finding unexpected mechanical properties.

The resultant glassy gels devised by the eventual team of eight are stretchy, sticky, more than 50% liquid and as strong as water bottle plastic.

Usually, when a solvent is added to a polymer the solvent pushes the polymer chains apart, making it soft – which is why a dry contact lens isn’t as supple as one that’s wet. In the manufacture of plastics with similar properties, a feedstock polymer has to be made and transported to another facility where it’s melted and formed into the end product.

Each of these new gels is a mixture of long polymers and ILs that can sustain a stretch of their original size by more than 650%, withstand up to 400 times the atmospheric pressure, and are transparent solids. Creating them is simply a case of curing it in any type of mould, or 3D printing it.

With dentistry’s innovative computer designed restorations and NASA-developed materials that so highly serve orthodontics, glassy gels are certain to find a place in affordable improvements for better oral health.

Stretch and strength are designated by ratio; so by just changing these two ingredients, something as elastic and flexible as a rubber band or as hard as glass can be produced. Pliability comes from ionic liquid filling the spaces between the much firmer polymer molecules and pushing them apart; what prevents them completely breaking away from each other is the electrostatic attraction of the charged particles and polymers.

What’s more, is it has self-healing ability. Broken edges seamlessly rebind under heat application.

Again, by applying high temperature, stretched glassy gels will return to their original shape. What’s also unusual for any hard material, is the highly adhesive surface each has. Being more than half liquid, not only are they more efficient electricity conductors than any comparable common plastic, but notably, they don’t dry out or evaporate.

Glassy gels mark a new sphere of materials. The potential is as barely imagined as a North Yorkshire boy from a family of labourers observing the transit of Venus, calculating the size of the solar system, and changing the map of the world.

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