An Artist and Inventor Working With Porcelain
 PEOPLE sometimes die in gruesome ways, which can make identifying their remains difficult.
A unique Idea to help make that process easier came to James Kim long before the attacks on the World Trade Center made clear the significance of such work.
Mr. Kim, a dental technician, has patented an identification technique based on embedding a name or number in the porcelain of the crowns, bridges and other restorations he makes at his business. K-Art Dental Laboratory Corp in Commack.
He knows that teeth are the last part of a body to withstand fire. Porcelain teeth survive even beyond natural teeth, at temperatures up to nearly 1,800 degrees.
Mr. Kim envisions his tooth identification for use mostly by people in risky jobs - the military, police officers and firefighters - and those who might wander off, like people with Alzheimer's or mental retardation.
He said he hoped his idea would spawn a national database of dental records, with rescuers knowing that the first place to look for identifying information is in someone's mouth.
The Idea came to Mr. Kim, 50, when he served in the South Korean army in the late 1970's and kept misplacing his dog tags.
He said that if something had happened to him while his dog tags were missing, he would have been hard to identify. And he wondered about American soldiers who had died in the Korean War and whose remains had not been identified.
Before Immigrating to the United States in 1985, he attended a school of dental technology in Korea.
"I like to carve," said Mr. Kim, speaking In English with some translation help from a niece, Erica Kang. "I am like an artist, but you can't make money being an artist."
So the profession of dental technician, or ceramist, which requires great dexterity, was the next best thing.
Mr. Kim and his wife, Hyun Duk Kim, have three sons: Alex, 19, Andy, 16, and Timmy, 9. After living in Jackson Heights, Queens, they moved to East Northport and on to Huntington. Mr. Kim said he preferred the open suburbs to the crowded city, and liked Long Island for Its good schools, safe neighborhoods and proximity to the ocean.
He refined his tooth identification idea while working with Dr. Alvin Grayson, a prosthodontist whose office is just off Central Park in Manhattan. Mr. Kim said he had seen homeless people sleeping in the park, and he worried that they would die without anyone knowing who they were.
But even if they were not receiving dental care, Mr. Kim figured, they might have acquired crowns or laminates in the past that were still in place 20 or 30 years later.
Mr. Kim said he had long yearned to create dental innovations. His first came in the 1980's while working with Drs. Gregg Lituchy and Marc Lowenberg, well-known cosmetic dentists in Manhattan.
"When veneers came about, people said they wanted to go whiter," Dr. Lituchy said. "What was difficult was trying to describe to your ceramist how white you wanted to go."
Mr. Kim added a "white booster" to make the standard shade whiter still, Dr. Lituchy said, and he did so in different proportions depending on the whiteness required - a finicky technique requiring great skill.
Mr. Kim has "the talent to make porcelain look like real enamel," with the characteristics and translucency that give "a life to it like you were born with it," Dr. Lituchy said.
Mr. Kim later came up with the ID technique. It involves the use of a color stain atop a porcelain tooth restoration that is then coated with a layer of clear porcelain. (The restoration itself is created with layers of liquid and powder applied to a tooth model and then baked.) Identifying information, like a name or Social Security number, typically goes on the lingual surface - the tongue side - so it does not show.
About 100 people have had the tooth ID applied so far, Mr. Kim said. Some dentists include the cost in the fee for a crown; others charge about $100.
Dr. Stephen Eric Enriquez, a prosthodontist in Newburgh, N.Y., who uses Mr. Kim’s lab, offers the service to his patients.
"I tell them I can ID your crown in the back of your mouth just in case something catastrophic happens," he said. "They say it's a scary thought but probably not a bad idea. If something does happen, at least your loved ones will know."
Dr. Grayson said that about two dozen of his patients had received tooth ID's but that some had declined, saying that the procedure seemed unnecessary and that the reasoning behind it was unpleasant.
But traditional Identification of remains through dental records is labor intensive and tedious. X-rays must be acquired from a dentist or Insurance company and then compared with X-rays of the remains.
In mass disasters, there are mountains of data to sift through. And some individual cases are particularly tough, as when remains are found somewhere and nobody knows whose they are, let alone whether dental records exist, said Dr. Matthew Neary, a Manhattan periodontist who helped with identifications after the trade center attack.
The better someone's teeth, the harder it is to make an identification through dental records. "With fluoride and orthodontia, kids have straight teeth with little decay," Dr. Neary said. "You have no manmade structures and little pathology" that can help identify them.
But the tooth ID can easily be incorporated into a porcelain layer attached to a healthy tooth.
Still, Dr. Neary said, the system has "limited utility unless it is universal" and rescue workers know to look for the ID.
Mr. Kim's patent also involves a not-so-serious side, tooth "tattoos" decorative images like shamrocks and stars.
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