West Texas and the U.S.-Mexico border have been a bit of desert when it comes to dentistry. The dental school closest to El Paso is more than 500 miles away, and in El Paso County the number of dentists per population is only half the state average. A majority of the local population do not visit a dentist at all in a typical year. Thanks to Woody and Gayle Hunt, that problem is about to improve. The family, which operates a cluster of businesses in the region centered around real estate, construction, and finance, donated $25 million to open the first new dental school in Texas in nearly 50 years.