Researchers are trying to find ways to regrow fingers — and someday, even limbs — with tricks that sound like magic spells from a Harry Potter novel. There’s the guy who sliced off a fingertip but grew it back after he treated the wound with an extract of pig bladder. And the scientists who grow extra arms on salamanders. And the laboratory mice with the eerie ability to heal themselves. This summer, scientists are planning to see whether the powdered pig extract can help injured soldiers regrow parts of their fingers. And a large federally funded project is trying to unlock the secrets of how some animals regrow body parts so well, with hopes of applying the lessons to humans. The lessons could aid the larger field of regenerative medicine, perhaps someday helping people replace damaged parts of their hearts and spinal cords, and heal wounds and burns with new skin instead of scar. But that’s in the future. For now, consider the situation of Lee Spievack, a hobby-store salesman in Cincinnati. One evening in August 2005, he was helping a customer with a risky engine on a model airplane. And accidentally, "I put my finger through the prop." It sliced off his fingertip, leaving just a bit of the nail bed. The missing piece, three-eighths of an inch long, was never found. An emergency room doctor sent him to a hand surgeon, who recommended a skin graft. Instead, Spievack, now 68, consulted with his brother, Alan, a former Harvard surgeon who’d founded a company called ACell Inc., which makes an extract of pig bladder for promoting healing and tissue regeneration. Lee Spievack took his brother’s advice to forget about a skin graft and started applying the pig powder every two days. Within four weeks his finger had regained its original length, he says, and in four months "it looked like my normal finger." None of this proves the powder was responsible. But those outcomes have helped inspire an effort to try the powder this summer at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio on soldiers who have far more disabling finger loss because of burns.
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