Doctors are growing new body parts

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Lorraine Rivera - View Bio

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Nearly 5,000 men and women have given their lives while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are nearly 1,000 more soldiers who are coming home with devastating injuries. Amputations, skin grafts and plastic surgeries are the painful battles these wounded warriors face on the home front. Now, science has a way to re-grow body parts, turning what was once science fiction into fact.

Before Afghanistan, Joseph Paulk looked like the boy next door. When he came home, he learned his battle against the mirror was only beginning. "Forty percent burns to the face, the shoulder down to my hands, and my hip down to my ankles, then amputations to all 10 fingers because of how severe the burns were," he said.

Soon, amputations could be a thing of the past as doctors grow new body parts.

"We obviously have the potential to create a whole human in nine months," said Steve Badylak, M.D., D.V.M., Ph.D., director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

At the University of Pittsburgh, researchers are using powder made from a pig's bladder to re-grow fingers. In soldiers with more serious injuries, the goal is to at least create fingertips.

"Stimulating the growth of 10 to 11 millimeters of length allows them to make change at a grocery store, turn the key in the car, hold a fork," Dr. Badylak said.

Other researchers are working to reconstruct faces damaged by war. Joseph Vacanti, M.D., a pediatric surgeon at Mass General Hospital for Children, is engineering ears in his lab. "Ideally, it would be indistinguishable from a normal ear," Dr. Vacanti said.

Already successful in mice, Dr. Vacanti says he plans to implant the first ear on a human within a year. "We can now envision that some day we can give somebody back their own face."

From growing new feeling to new faces, other doctors focus on eliminating the need for skin grafts. Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Caolina, takes a piece of skin from a soldier and cooks it in an oven-like device.

"This is basically the same conditions as our body in a box," Dr. Atala said. Racks stretch the skin until it covers the size of the wound.

From civilians out of options, to soldiers whose sacrifice is measured in scars, science is growing new possibilities for healing the body and the human spirit.

The Department of Defense is providing Wake Forest, the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University and the Cleveland Clinic $85 million over the next five years to perfect organ and tissue-growing techniques.