At age 72, Lee Spievack lost a good half-inch of his middle finger as he pointed out a problem in a model airplane. Four weeks later, through cold, hard science, the finger had grown back with only the use of a special powder.

The miracle worker behind this superhuman story is a powder developed by Spievack’s brother Alan, a medical research scientist. The powder is derived from any normal pig bladder but the it doesn’t actually contain any pig cells. The powder is a dried version of the pig’s extracellular matrix, a kind of “soup” found in any and all biological organisms. The extracellular matrix is a mix of proteins and connective tissue that your body uses to control the actions that your cells take.

When the human body sustains an injury, the body fills the affected area with blood to start the regrowth and regeneration of the cells. This works great for scrapes and cuts, but when you lose a larger chunk, there isn’t anything left to fill. The body takes care of the remaining cut and you’re left missing a part of your finger. This extracellular powder doesn’t actually do any of the heavy-lifting but instead, simply tells your body to regrow your limbs (and even organs) in lieu of simply scarring them over.

After four weeks of cleaning his finger, sprinkling the dried extracellular powder over the injury and covering it with a bandage, his finger had grown back completely. For Lee Spievack, this meant growing back a half-inch of his finger. Considering the powder simply harnesses the existing regenerative power of the body, it could potentially be used to regrow just about any organs or limbs.

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