Like any solid citizen of the internet, I love xkcd.com. But this recent comic brought out the angry nerd in me:
The Y axis here is “Risk of Your Research Being Used by a Super Villain for World Domination.” So why is dentistry all the way in the lower left quadrant?
While I’m sure teeth aren’t going to get up and attack Atlanta anytime soon (so the X axis placement of “dentistry” seems appropriate), does no one remember their James Bond history? Super villains love using dentistry for evil!
Let’s start with the most obvious example, Jaws, the henchman in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. This dude’s surgically modified teeth:
- broke a steel cable
- bit through chains
- ripped a guy’s throat out
- nearly broke James Bond’s hand when he punched them
- survived dental electrocution
- took a bullet
- even beat a shark at its own game!
And if Jaws vs. Jaws ain’t enough to go on, let’s not forget how Diamonds Are Forever‘s plot was forged basically out of a dentist extracting diamonds from the teeth of miners (not “minors,” thank god–the movie was shot in the 1970s).
Still not super-villainy enough for ya? Try Raoul Silva, the MI6 agent-turned-cyberterrorist of Skyfall, whose turn to evil was literally created by dental technology! When a hydrogen cyanide capsule goes wrong in his mouth during his five months in a Chinese torture camp, maiming him rather than killing him, it becomes the very inspiration for his attempt at world domination.
(Sure, purists may point out that the script doctors got this one wrong–hydrogen cyanide in its liquid form is about as acidic as lemon juice, so one toothful could never turn Javier Bardeem into a droopy-faced maniac. But that’s just more reason for YOUR research on dentistry to be the scientific breakthrough to make it work!)
And we’ve just scratched the super villain surface today regarding teeth–this is merely the world of Bond fiction. I can’t wait to see what kind of dystopian nightmares come out of the very-real-and-already-being-implemented blending of dental science with laser beams and bionic superpowers!