Now that scientists have announced the mapping of the human genetic code, I can come clean. I am a national expert on genetic engineering in dentistry. I’m not kidding. Just ask the producer at the network television news affiliate who called me for advice last summer for a story he was airing on growing test tube teeth. Or the national radio news service reporter who wanted to interview me about advances in genetic manipulation of human adult teeth. Or the major university who tried to book me for a keynote lecture detailing my "research."

Tempting as they were, I declined both the TV standup and the lecture because of one small detail: I don’t actually know anything about the human genome. I’ve got 100,000 or so genes of my own, like everyone else, and about three billion DNA units, but I wouldn’t recognize a nucleotide if it smacked me in the face. All I am is a country dentist with a twinkle in my eye and a serviceable modem.

My far-flung reputation sprang from a story I wrote awhile back about the future of dentistry, into which I tucked a tidbit about the possibility of growing new adult teeth. I had read an article about a British study whose researchers speculated they could develop a gel containing genetic information that would stimulate a particular type of tooth to grow. Think of it! the article exulted. Just remove that wrecked molar and stimulate another one in a few weeks to sprout right out of the bone. Although to date actual teeth have been grown only in mouse kidneys (how about that for ectopic eruption?), I mentioned the researchers’ findings.

My story about a story made its way to people who knew people. Suddenly people were calling me. I explained that I couldn’t offer any particular insights into the life-ordering chemical configurations spiraling down the double helix. The university politely withdrew its lecture request, but none of the other folks seemed to mind my empty head. The radio news reporter still wanted me to lend my dental degree to a sound bite.

It seems the nature of authority has changed. An expert used to be someone very knowledgeable on a given subject. John Steinbeck once described a skillful cook this way: "She was so expert with the rolling pin that the dough seemed alive." These days an expert has become more of a spokesperson. You just pick up the rolling pin—along with an audience—and you’re on your way. The dough goes in your checking account.

If experts were once associated with wisdom, now they are about market share. In spite of more and more of our population becoming college-educated, our culture increasingly cries out for experts, people who stand out from the crowd and can guide us with sage advice and prognostications. In this age of entertainment, a little showmanship enhances the expert’s impact. Witness Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the radio talk show psychologist whose astounding success has helped transform experts into celebrities.

This tale has two morals. The first is a memo to our consumer selves: Temper enthusiasm for expert advice with healthy skepticism. The truth is, being an expert takes more confidence than knowledge. That fact is lampooned in a recent TV commercial for a motel chain, which shows a planeful of skydivers about to jump. "Have you ever done this before?" a nervous neophyte asks the instructor as he clips her into the static line. "No," he smiles, "but last night I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express!" Dr. Laura’s Ph.D., it turns out, is not in psychology, but physiology.

That’s not to suggest that we abandon expert advice. As professionals, accustomed to being authority figures ourselves, we may fear that consulting an expert uncomfortably exposes our greenness in other fields. "You know what an expert is, don’t you?" my uncle, a college president, used to growl. "An ex is a has-been and a spurt is a drip under pressure." Yet our shifting financial, emotional, health or career situations may be greatly improved by entrusting them to someone else’s able ministrations.

Which brings me to the second moral of my story: Be the expert your patients crave. Take time to answer questions. Experts dispense not only information, but reassurance. While magazines and pharmacies give away dental advice, dentists who are perceived as inaccessible may give away pieces of their authority. We make repairs with hand pieces and scalpels, but we heal with caring and concern.

Make your expertise available to the local medical community as well. As a dentist on staff at our local community hospital, I field consultation requests from a variety of other doctors. Just the other day, for example, I was called bedside to confer over the possibility that an in-patient’s leg infection might be causing him to brux.

I admit, I left a little disappointed that no one asked me about test tube teeth.

From Inscriptions, Journal of the Arizona Dental Association, 15(2):5, August 2000.  Dr. Eric Curtis is author of Hand to Mouth: Essays on the Art of Dentistry, Quintessence, 2002.

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