TEST-TUBE TEETH

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20058, 3 October 1939, Page 13

TEST-TUBE TEETH

WOMAN’S ACHIEVEMENT NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE, Aug. 3. Mrs. Shirley Hughes, 30-year-old scientist with a dream that some day men and women of 90 will have perfect teeth, was, cheered in Newcastle to-day by' 500 dentists. Members of the British Dental Association and dental surgeons from Holland, Norway, South Africa and Palestine stood to applaud her as she walked up the conference hall to receive the Howard Mummery prize—the Nobel prize of dentistry.

She took the vellum, and the cheque for 50 gns, said “Thank You,” and returned to her seat. It was over in three minutes. But to become the central figure in that ceremony Mrs. Hughes ha'd given up a £6OO-a-year post, worked five years in a laboratory at Cambridge University.

When she was Miss Glass, young school dentist, she met a research scientist working in the laboratory. They married. He talked to her of his experiments. She decided she wanted to experiment, too; gave up her school post for a £3-a-weelc appointment in the laboratory. There she achieved the “impos sible.” She grew living teeth in a test tube. Because of her work it was decided that for the first time the Mummery prize should go to a woman—“for the most outstanding research work of the past three years.''