Kids who lose a baby tooth will often put it under their pillow for the Tooth Fairy. But Julia Shi's dad Songtai is a dentist and a medical researcher at the National Institutes of Health. When Julia, then 6, shed a tooth recently, they noticed that a little piece of red pulp was still attached. That gave him an idea, and the next time she lost a tooth, he placed it in a liquid used to culture cells. Back at the lab, he extracted the pulp and found that it contained a number of stem cells, those special progenitor cells that...
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