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Female Scientist Who Changed Dental Care Honored

Sumita Mitra made a product dentists and their patients love, which almost never happens.
On Australia's National Smile Day, clown doctor, Dr. B. Looney, uses a giant toothbrush to clean the teeth on the face at the entrance to Luna Park in Sydney in 2010.
GettyImages-98206683

She wasn’t aiming to make  history. But in the late 1990s,  when Sumita Mitra, a chemist at 3M, began to use nanotechnology to improve dental fillings, that’s exactly what happened. Now found in dental offices—and virtually every mouth—her fillings are one of those life-changing innovations we take for granted. 

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