The Gies Report and Research.

In the eyes of the intellectually curious William Gies, dentistry and dental education in 1926 was mechanical, empirical, commercial, reparative, and isolated from other disciplines. The solution proposed in the Gies Report included making dental schools parts of universities and collaborative equals with medical schools, increasing full-time teachers, promoting graduate study, and especially, grounding dentistry in science. Early attempts by the American Dental Association to develop and support a research agenda floundered, and scholarship was left to the universities and the government, and more recently to commercial interests. To a disappointing extent, the separation of practice from science remains today as the technologies of the scientific spirit remain unfamiliar and vaguely threatening.