With more than 200 million Americans using cell phones these days, many of them inappropriately, it was bound to come down to this eventually.

There’s a cell phone backlash reverberating across the land. It’s coming not just from individuals who have long sought relief from the incessant chatter around them in public places, but also from business owners of every sort who are desperate to restore some sense of order to their establishments.

USA Today, which reported on this growing movement last month, told of a busy family dental clinic in Arlington, Texas, where patients were actually trying to talk on their cell phones while the dentists worked in their mouths. Now that’s what I call a serious cell phone addiction.

“Would you mind speaking up, please? I’m having a hard time hearing you over this annoying drill.”

The office manager, who called the behavior “disruptive,” said patients also talked while having their teeth X-rayed. It got so bad, in fact, that the dental practice had to put up a sign asking patients to please shut off their phones while they open wide.

The newspaper likened the cell phone crackdown to the national campaign against smokers, who now are forced to indulge their bad habits in restricted areas only. Cell phone use is being increasingly limited in restaurants, golf courses, banks, post offices, gyms and even – God help us – places of worship.

Owners of finer restaurants, frustrated with all the loud, one-sided conversations going on, are building special rooms with padded walls where people who need a cell phone fix can talk their heads off without bothering the other diners. More and more public libraries are requesting that patrons make their calls in the lobbies, too, and one YMCA in Virginia not only banned camera phones from its locker rooms – as some Maine Ys have done – but also prohibits cell-phone use in the exercise area.

Because wireless technology is developing so much faster than the social rules to govern it, science has jumped into the fray. Through the use of nanotechnology, a company in Rochester, N.Y., recently announced it had developed a paint that can block cell phone signals. Its inventors say it can be used to coat the walls of concert halls, movie theaters, schools, funeral parlors and other places where telephone conversations are definitely taboo.

One of the researchers said a large number of the requests for stealth jamming technology has come from pastors in churches around the country, who complain that people making and receiving calls is raising holy hell with Sunday services.

Alas, Americans have managed to talk themselves into a curious social dilemma over the last few years. When it comes to cell phones, we can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. And it only promises to get more interesting as the technology continues to grow ever more sophisticated.

On its Web site, The Korea Times reports that Samsung Electronics is working with a research team to develop cell phone software that can feel, think, evolve and, through “artificial chromosomes,” pass on traits to the next generation of phones.

“It will breathe power into cell phones, bringing the gadgets to life,” said professor Kim Jong-hwan at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, who predicts the software-enabled cell phones will be in the stores by next year.

Wow, living cell phones capable of reproduction. What will they think of next, I wonder, and do we really want to know?