The Skin of Your Teeth

“I escape with the skin of my teeth.” This expression, found at Job 19:20, prompts the question: What is the skin of your teeth? A report in Scientific American of June, 1953, says: “Microscopic techniques now reveal tooth enamel to be not a dead shell but the hardest and strongest tissue in the body, a ‘superskin’. . . . Essentially the teeth consist of two types of hard tissue: the dentine or ivory core, and the enamel, or ‘skin’. . . . The enamel is produced by skin (epithelial) cells. . . . Enamel is unique among living matter in two respects; it has no cells or blood vessels. . . . Certainly enamel cannot reproduce itself, as living tissues usually do. But then, neither can some of the highly specialized cells of the body, such as the brain neurons. . . . We used radioactive isotopes of phosphorus, calcium, iodine and other elements to find out whether . . . a turnover took place in the enamel. The experiments proved that it did. . . . In short, the enamel is not as fixed or as dead as it seems. Like other hard tissues, it carries on a traffic with its environment, albeit without the aid of blood vessels or cells.” In its issue of November 15, 1916, page 348, The Watch Tower published a description of this ‘skin of the teeth’ in vindication of Job’s words.