Octopus-Biology Dentures

One of the mysteries of nature, solved just a few years ago, involved the mouthpart or beak of the ordinary octopus. This is the hardest substance in the animal's body, and it is the ONLY hard substance in the animal's body. Any hole that the beak can fit through, the entire octopus can fit through. But how is that beak attached to the octopus, such that it doesn't rip directly free from otherwise-soft tissues? See the squid-beak link for details; the answer applies to the octopus, too.

The Idea here is that we apply that answer to the realm of denture-manufacturing, and do it inexpensively by using 3D printing technology, in the following generic way.

First we laser-scan the patient's mouth, to determine the precise shape the dentures need to be, to fit perfectly. Dentures are traditionally expensive because each has to be unique; every mouth is different in its fine details.

Next, we feed that data to a 3D printer, with a very soft plastic as its "stock" for making stuff. For the purposes of this presentation, I'm going to talk about tenth-millimeter increments, in terms of layers of plastic --3D printers can actually make things using finer layers than that, and in practice we might really need to do denture-manufacturing with finer layers.

The first layer, with that very-soft plastic, is the layer that will directly contact the gums in the mouth of the patient, and which must fit perfectly on one side. (This layer might need to be thicker than 1/10 mm; more on this later.) On the other side, we can start to balance-out the bumps and depressions.

The next layer uses a slightly harder plastic, and of course must fit the first layer precisely, but doesn't need to fit the gums of the patient. We can even-out the bumps and depressions some more.

Repeat for a few more layers, of increasingly-hard plastic. We should now have a pretty-even layer, upon which to build the teeth of the dentures.

Using the hardest plastic of the sequence, all the layers needed to construct the teeth are built up. When done, the overall denture construction can be removed from the printer, cleaned, and the patient might be able to start wearing it immediately.

Note that one of the other features of octopus biology is the "sucker", of which there are very-many on its tentacles. This very-soft biological substance can firmly grip things, and the design of the sucker was the inspiration for human devices that, for example, are attached to toy darts and shot from toy guns (link).

If that first perfectly-fitting layer of softest plastic, in the construction of these dentures, is pliable enough, it should be able to vacuum-stick to the gum-regions of the mouth without need of any ordinary denture adhesive.