This refers to all sorts of congenital or acquired dental abnormalities.

Let us start at the beginning, the very beginning, that is. We all know what it takes to get to this point, the animation shows a more advanced stage of the process. After insemination, a clump of cells begins to form out of the male sperm and the female egg cell. Within this clump, individual cells begin to form groups, resulting in two different networks, called the ectoderm and the entoderm. A third network of cells forms from the ectoderm, and is called the mesoderm.

So at the beginning the clump of cells consists of the ectoderm, the mesoderm and the entoderm. For those among you who are interested in this topic
• the ectoderm eventually turns into the brain, the eyes, the spinal cord, the peripheral nervous system, the nails, the skin and the hair – oh and the teeth too.
• The mesoderm goes on to form the bones , skin , muscles, urinary tract, digestive system, blood and blood vessels – and teeth too
• the entoderm forms the lungs, the tonsils, thyroid gland, liver, pancreas, parts of the bladder and the inner ear

We will now skip a few steps and go on to the embryo. In its jaw, which at this stage has the consistency of connective tissue, ecto- and mesodermal cells form dental ridges, which bunch up to form tooth buds, which later become teeth.

As you may recall from the beginning, the original cells go through a lot of changes, the egg cell and the sperm cell eventually forming nerve cells, heart cells, blood cells and many other types of cells and organs. Biologists speak of cell differentiation and embryogenesis.

For those of you who are interested, molecular biologists are especially curious about „embryonic stem cells“. Embryonic stem cells are all cells of an embryo in the early stages. These cells are multipotent, meaning they are capable of turning into any other type of cell (heart cells, nerve cells, muscle cells, etc). In the course of cell division and cell differentiation, however, cells lose this ability.

They differentiate more and more until finally they are only capable of fulfilling certain tasks – a heart cell contracts continually, and all these cell contractions together result in a heartbeat. For a long time, it was believed that adults only possessed fully differentiated cells. This is why embryonic stem cells were such a hot topic, as they are able to develop into just about any other type of cell.
Then it was discovered that adults also have some cells still capable of turning back into these „ancestor cells“. These are called adult stem cells. The idea was that new organs could be made out of these cells in order to get the better of a lot of illnesses. In plain speech, this means that we in the industrialized countries can continue our consumption-oriented lifestyle, since we can just grow a new liver anyway.

Let us now leave the discussion of global problems and turn our attention to dental anomalies. The film is intended to show you two things: first, congenital anomalies are rare and usually affect all, or at least most of the teeth! Here you can see what happens when problems appear in the ectoderm, a so-called dentine dysfunction. Here you can see dysfunctions in the enamel. The transition from milk teeth to teeth did not quite go as planned. As the milk teeth did not fall out, the remaining teeth were not able to develop as they should. These teeth are called conical teeth, they are not securely attached to the jaw and usually fall out very quickly. Sometimes teeth intergrow as in this picture. But these anomalies need not have genetic causes. For example, the mother of this patient took tetracycline, an antibiotic, while she was pregnant. This caused discolorations in the teeth. As you can see, these anomalies affect all the teeth, but they are also very rare. So there must be another reason why our teeth are only „bad“ on one side, as fillings are usually done on the side teeth.