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Fie on us! The culmination of all the great minds of dentistry since the beginning of time -- the fruition of dental intellect -- has peaked with some pathetic technique to make teeth whiter in one hour. This is our most impressive triumph since the introduction of flavored floss. The shame of it! Pierre, come back from wherever you are.

BBC News puts it to us straight: Students at the Royal College of Arts in London have developed a phone that fits inside a tooth. You understand? A phone inside a tooth! These are not dental students; these are, specifically, two graduate kids named James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau who probably wear berets and drive a Morris Minor with a missing petrol cap.

It takes two laypersons -- art students, mind you -- to recognize civilization’s greatest need, i.e., the need to communicate and to incorporate devices to do so into common objects normally found around the mouth. This is no credit to a profession seemingly obsessed with a self-imposed mandate of supplying "perfect smiles."

As usual, details of this breakthrough are sketchy. When you are onto something this big, you don’t blab it all over until the patents and other financial arrangements have been set.

The basic concept is this: The device picks up signals with a radio receiver and uses a tiny vibrating plate to convey them as sound along the jawbone to a person’s ear. See how carefully this BBC release is worded? JAWBONE. Playing their cards pretty close to the weskit along with the term "vibrating plate," nobody is giving away much.

The absolute pits is the fact that we could have done this research ourselves instead of wasting so much time in staff meetings trying to determine whose job description covers cleaning up the doctor’s daily mess in the lab. Our British art student cousins speculate that their phone-in-a-tooth could be used by stock traders to receive up-to-the-minute information about what Martha Stewart might be up to or to help football coaches communicate with some 300-pound offensive linebacker during crucial moments of mayhem.

Relatively few years ago, we had the nucleus of this phone idea securely on our side of the pond when Maxwell Smart successfully communicated with his superiors via his shoe phone. It seems now, in retrospect, that the logical transition from foot to mouth would have been picked up by Dentsply or S.S. White. But no, their entire R&D teams were intent on putting an angle to a toothbrush handle to reach those posterior teeth, the very same teeth that could have been better put to housing mobile phones.

Perhaps it is not too late. If we read between the lines of the BBC News report, we notice no mention is made of transmitting with the tooth phone, only receiving. This is the same one-sided effect you get from listening to your kids prattle interminably on conventional phones at 49 cents a minute. A tooth phone is not going to make a big impact in the market until it’s a two-way device. Then watch Sprint, AT&T, et al. vie to make your teeth vibrate like a front-end alignment gone bad.

The specter of seeing people’s lips moving when there is no one near could take some getting used to, but to a nation of phone addicts who routinely make one-handed left turns in heavy traffic while conducting animated conversations on their cell phones, nothing is beyond belief.

In the meanwhile, if you have any dental ideas -- any at all -- contact James or Jimmy at the Royal College of Art for help in implementing them. Ask for extension #3, it’s their maxillary outside line. And try reversing the charges -- see if they notice.