Holding his finger up to the light, Lee Spievack is in no doubt that he is a walking miracle.
A Vietnam veteran, the 69-year-old was wounded during hand-to-hand combat on the battlefields of South-east Asia. A bayonet was thrust through his palm as he struggled for life before his enemy was shot dead.
That wound healed naturally. But Spievack is now at the centre of an extraordinary furore over a new "miracle" that he insists could change the future of the human race.
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Finger of suspicion? Lee Spievack shows off his 'miracle' middle finger
It holds out the astonishing - and seemingly implausible - prospect that new limbs and organs can be grown with the help of a mysterious substance dubbed "pixie dust," taken from the bladders of pigs.
Amid derision from scientists and claims that he is just a "snake oil salesman," Spievack insists that his astonishing recovery from a recent injury sustained during an accident with a model aeroplane is proof that a way has been discovered to make the human body regenerate itself.
Spievack will today be paraded before an international conference to show off the middle finger of his right hand - supposedly severed when it was caught in the propeller of a model he was trying to fix, only to be magically restored.
After a lavish dinner, the self-proclaimed "miracle man" will tell his remarkable story to an audience of world medical experts.
The barest details of what he will say - that his finger grew back after being treated with pixie dust - were leaked two weeks ago, and Spievack has already been inundated with requests from around the world by the sick and the dying.
Desperate for supplies of this supposedly wondrous dust, thousands have been in touch with him in the hope that he can transform their lives.
So what is the truth? Is he a quack? Or can we really believe Spievack's story of a finger regenerating itself - along with the extraordinary implications for medical science?
Spievack's finger when it was severed
For an answer, I travelled to Spievack's home in Cincinnati - and uncovered an astonishing saga.
Far from being a hustler or a fantasist, this decorated former soldier appears to be entirely sincere - yet he's also the public face of a business involving vast sums of money, and Supreme Court battles, and which has attracted the interest of the U.S. President.
With countless people hoping this "breakthrough" could help them grow new limbs as well as vital organs - replacing diseased livers, kidneys and even hearts - Spievack's finger has spawned a multi-billion- dollar industry.
This month, the White House agreed to pump in more than $500m (£256m) to research whether pixie dust can help thousands of wounded soldiers grow new limbs, fingers and toes lost during the war in Iraq.
With the use of high-tech laboratories and special facilities built to create the dust, President George W. Bush hopes any breakthrough could ease the political fall-out from the war.
As for Lee Spievack himself, he insists he stands to make nothing from the pixie dust even if it does get proved to work.
In fact, he had never even heard of the research to develop pixie dust until his brother, a doctor, insisted he used it to treat his damaged finger.
"I didn't plan on cutting off my finger," he says, showing me where it was chopped off by the propeller of the model plane at his hobby shop.
"The piece of finger flew up into the air. We all looked for it to pack it in ice in the hope it could be sewn back on, but we couldn't find it. I was prepared to face the rest of my life without it, thinking things could have been much worse."
With blood spurting from what was left of his finger, Spievack was taken by paramedics to the local hospital, where the wound was bandaged. He was told that all the surgeon could do was to graft skin from his arm or thigh over his finger to seal the stump.
Instead, his brother Alan - a doctor who had researched cell regeneration on account of a childhood obsession with the fact that salamanders and lizards can re-grow severed limbs - told him to cancel the operation.
"I didn't question my brother. He's older than me and he's a doctor, so I just did what he said."
Alan sent Lee a white, talc-like powder in a small bottle and told him to sprinkle it on the open wound every two days.
Lee did as he was told. The finger, he says, started growing. And growing.
Within four weeks, he says his recovery was complete. His finger was back - to exactly the same length and dimensions as before. Producing pictures he took immediately after the accident, they show his finger to be a bloody pulp, cut off at the point where his nail begins and with bone visible. Beside the pictures, Spievack holds out his new finger for inspection.
Apart from a tiny scar on the tip, it is now impossible to tell that the finger was ever damaged.
I touch the "wound" - it is calloused, like the hard skin on the heels of feet.
"I have not had any problems with it," says Spievack, who won the Purple Heart for gallantry during combat in Vietnam.
"But I have to cut the nail of that finger three times a week, compared with once a week for my other nails.
"That nail seems to grow at a crazy speed. I just hope my story can help others. I repeat, I have nothing to gain from all this."
The pixie dust saga began more than 50 years ago. Growing up in Cincinnati, Lee and Alan Spievack raised salamanders in their mother's pie dishes. Like children around the world, they were fascinated by the animal world around them. Lee's job was to feed the salamanders with pieces of hamburger held on tweezers.
But Alan, five years older than Lee, took it further. After graduating, he won a Fulbright Scholarship and later a place at Harvard Medical School after producing academic papers on the way that these reptiles could re-grow limbs.
He knew this was true: with the cruelty of childhood, he and his brother used to chop off their pets' arms and legs, and watch in astonishment as new body parts grew to replace them.
Then, as Lee went off to Vietnam, Alan continued his salamander "studies" as a sideline while working to become one of the top surgeons in America. A chance meeting during a conference 12 years ago made him step up his research.
He listened as Dr Stephen Badylak, a former veterinary surgeon and civil engineer, described how his pet dog, Rocky, was dying from a faulty artery.
Badylak explained how he had removed part of Rocky's intestine and stitched it in place of the artery.
The inner lining of the intestine regenerates itself every six days. And, astonishingly, he says the intestine he put in Rocky mutated and became indistinguishable from a real artery, changing its own shape and composition naturally.
He tried the same procedure on other dogs, replacing tendons, bladders and ligaments successfully. He realised that the intestine's cells had been used by the body as a scaffold around which new tissue and organs can grow.
While the exact details of how the new powder works is a closely-guarded secret, some doctors say it appears to trick the human body into thinking that it needs to grow new flesh or organs.
In the same way that cells "tell" a baby in the womb that it has not fully developed, instructing it to grow fingers, organs and eyes, clinical trials appear to show that compounds taken from a pig's bladder and modified in laboratories trigger a similar process in adults.
There have been numerous cases of children re-growing fingers and toes up to the age of two, though nobody had been able to pinpoint how this happens, or why it stops at that age.
Badylak thinks he now knows the secret. However, despite publishing countless papers about his findings, he was dismissed as a fraud by the medical establishment. But Alan Spievack was transfixed, asking Badylak afterwards why his methods were not being used to save human lives.
"Because nobody believes me," Badylak replied.
The two formed a partnership and a company called ACell to patent their research. They also set up a special laboratory, with filtered air to keep out disease, to breed donor pigs (the animals have many biological similarities to humans, which Badylak says makes their cells ideal for stimulating regrowth).
More than 1,000 pigs are now killed each day at ACell's farm, and specific cells from their bladders are harvested before being dried and turned into powder - the white substance Lee Spievack sprinkled on his finger to make it grow. In essence, it is said to stop scar tissue forming so that the organs can grow back.
Already, appeals have been flooding in to Badylak and Spievack.
"I'm a mother from Bologna, Italy, and my daughter was born with a defective hand," says one letter. "She's three years old now. She's being made fun of in school. We'd like her to have a normal life. She's a beautiful child. We're willing to travel to the States. What can you do for her?"
Badylak says: "These letters are just just heartbreaking. I got another last week from the family of a little girl who fell off a wagon and into a meat-grinder - it included a picture of her hand all chopped up. I think that in ten years we will be able to help people like that."
Yet many experts still do not believe that pixie dust works, pointing out that Lee's injury was relatively minor and his finger could have re-grown anyway. They mock the fact that the "experiment" was not monitored by independent doctors.
"This man lost some skin and flesh from the tip of his finger," says Ben Goldacre, a doctor and editor of the Bad Science website.
"Fingers grow back very well if that's all you've lost. In particular, skin grows back amazingly well.
"It never ceases to astonish me, when I take a heroic fall on my roller-skates, that a few months later there is no evidence of any foolishness on my palms, knees, or face."
If Lee's finger had regrown from below one of the joints, Goldacre would have been more impressed, since this would involve regenerating structures far more complex than just flesh and skin. But this, he says, is not what happened.
However, Alan Spievack is not around to defend his creation: he died in March from bladder cancer - one of the deadly diseases he claimed his pixie dust could cure - after other doctors refused to use it to save him.
"That's the biggest problem - convincing doctors that it works,' says Lee, tears welling in his eyes at the memory that his brother did not survive to see his work accepted by the U.S. government.
"I won't make anything from this, but I hope his family see their stocks soar when people finally realise just how important this dust is."
The U.S. military establishment is sufficiently interested in Spievack's dust to test it on two soldiers who lost their fingers in explosions.
The trials start this week at the Fort Sam military hospital in Texas, where Dr Steven Wolf, a burns specialist, will sprinkle the dust on the soldiers.
"We hope that we can grow back these missing parts," he told me. "It may be that the whole finger can't be replaced - we don't know if bone and joints will grow back - but we're optimistic.
"I think that in a few years we will be saving all sorts of people from horrible disabilities - not just soldiers, but civilians as well."
Clinical trials are also being carried out into a variety of new procedures that many scientists believe will lead to entire organs being re-grown, using methods similar to those pioneered by Alan Spievack.
One U.S. company has already successfully grown human bladders in laboratories, using cells sprayed onto a scaffold built in the shape of the organ, and has transplanted them back into patients with amazing results during clinical trials. Similar work is under way to make livers and kidneys.
With other pharmaceutical companies claiming their doctors have also been working on pixie dust, legal challenges are being planned to contest patents lodged by the Spievack family's company about their work. If pixie dust is proven to be effective, the pioneers of this research stand to make billions.
Back at Lee Spievack's hobby shop, the man with the golden finger snorts at those who claim he is a fraud.
"I know what happened," he says. "It's my finger and it grew back.
"People can say what they like. All the great pioneers get mocked. My brother was a genius. One day soon, the world will come to realise that."
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