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-The amputation of a fingertip - by a car door, lawn mower, electric fan, or whatever - is one of the most common childhood injuries.

-The standard treatment is to smooth the exposed bone and stitch the skin closed, or, if the digit has been retrieved and was cleanly cut, to try to reattach it by microsurgery.

-The sad fact is that even the most painstaking surgery gives less than optimal results. The nails are usually deformed or missing, and the fingers are too short and often painful, with a diminished or absent sense of touch.

-In the early 1970s at the emergency room of Sheffield Children's Hospital in England, one of the youngster with such an injury benefited from a clerical mixup.

-The attending physician dressed the wound, but the customary referral to a surgeon for closure was never made. When the error was caught a few days later, surgeon Cynthia Illingworth noticed that the fingertip was regenerating!

-She merely watched nature take its course.

-Illingworth began treating other children with such "neglect," and by 1974 she'd documented several hundred regrown fingertips, all in children eleven years old or younger.

-Other clinical studies have sinced confirmed that young children's fingers cleanly sheared off beyond the outermost crease of the outermost joint will invariably regrow perfectly in about three months.

-This crease seems to be a sharp dividing line, with no intermediate zone between perfect restoration and none at all.

-Some pediatric surgeons, like Michael Bleicher of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, have become so confident in the infallibility of the process that they'll finish amputating a fingertip that's just hanging by a bit of flesh.

-A lost one with reneerate as good as new, whereas one that has merely been mutilated will heal as a stump or with heavy scarring.