Why on earth would you want a tooth made of steel? Steel is extremely dense and heavy; you don't want something that heavy in your mouth. There's multiple rea

Why on earth would you want a tooth made of steel? Steel is extremely dense and heavy; you don't want something that heavy in your mouth. There's multiple reasons that implants today are made of titanium. Biocompatibility is one reason, but low weight is a nice bonus. Titanium isn't as hard as steel, though, but that shouldn't matter for fake teeth: it would likely be coated with a ceramic anyway, because no one wants gray-metal teeth unless they're trying to look like a Terminator. I'm pretty sure this is already how crowns are generally made today. AFAICT, artificial teeth should outperform natural ones in every way, except one very important one: how it interfaces with the rest of the body. And that's probably the biggest reason there's research on growing replacements in-situ like this. It's like this for every kind of implant I think.