If the applications of oral gene transfer are expanded to systemic diseases, oral health care providers in the future could routinely be ‘‘gene therapists’’ with therapeutic targets well outside the oral cavity. To summarize to this point, it is accurate to say that DNA is a form of text with its own alphabet, and that we can learn to read as well as rewrite DNA, in the process activating the genetic programme designed to turn our introns into exons (via transposons) and create new protein transcrip- tion sequences that lead to regeneration, or re-gene-ration.