Big Brother is Biting You

Given that we face a future of natural disasters and terrorist attacks, scientists at a Belgian university have been working on a new method of saving the difficulty and expense involved in identifying the victims. Dr Patrick Thevissen and his forensically odontological colleagues drilled a hole into a tooth and inserted an ID chip as they would a filling. Such a chip can hold personal information for direct readout or a code whereby a reader can link to a database. The advantage of this tag, said team member Guy Poelman, "is that it will allow swift identification of a decomposed body". It is always wise to take precautions in case one should decompose without the usual means of identification. The tag is an adaptation of one which veterinarians routinely inject into animals; in the scorched and mini-nuked New American Century which awaits us, corporations will naturally wish to keep track of their human resources. "We want to store it in the tooth because it's the strongest and longest lived body part," Dr Thevissen said. It has been known for teeth to survive for hundreds of thousands of years, as in the case of certain extinct primate species which were unacquainted with Coca-Cola. "When you put all identification data in one place in the body there can be no mistakes," claims Dr Thevissen, who for a forensic odontologist seems remarkably unaware of the processes known as "extraction" and "transplant", or the possibility that what one dentist has joined another may put asunder.