Dr. Alan Spievack, 74, educator, cellular regeneration pioneer taught at Harvard

Dr. Alan Spievack held 19 patents for medical devices. His got interested in regeneration while working with salamanders.

Boston surgeon Dr. Alan Spievack, a pioneer in cellular regeneration who spent more than 40 years teaching at Harvard and performing surgery at area hospitals, died March 15 at his home in Cambridge. He was 74 and had cancer.

Several years ago, Dr. Spievack's research helped a relative: He used a powder extract of pig bladder to regrow his brother's finger when a model airplane propeller sliced off the tip in a 2005 accident.

"What he's done with my finger, he said it will be to this generation what antibiotics was to the last generation," said Lee Spievack, who works in a hobby shop in Cincinnati.

The research is now being tested by the military on the injured hands of five Iraq war veterans in San Antonio. The US Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston began its pilot study after doctors saw before-and-after photos of Lee's finger and reviewed research published by Dr. Spievack and Stephen Badylak of the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

"Alan never did anything the traditional way," Badylak said. "Alan always bucked the system and didn't accept things the way they were, which is probably why he was successful."

In 1999, Dr. Spievack founded a regenerative medicine company called ACell Inc., based in Maryland. ACell owns the patents for "extracellular matrix" powder and markets products to veterinarians.

Dr. Spievack held 19 US patents for medical devices, and his collaboration with Badylak won 10 research grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The men published research demonstrating regeneration in animals of the larynx, vocal cords, esophagus, bladder, and all the components of the muscular skeletal system.

Dr. Spievack's interest in regeneration began in the 1950s while he was an undergraduate at Kenyon College, according to an article about him in the Kenyon College Bulletin. His biology professor, Maxwell E. Power, assigned him to raise salamanders, clip off their limbs, and record how long it took for them to regenerate. Dr. Spievack often credited the professor for inspiring him to become a doctor.

His brother Lee recalled feeding bits of hamburger to his older brother's salamanders for the project. "He operated on them and I photographed them and fed them," he said.

Born in Cincinnati, Dr. Spievack was the middle son of lawyer Albert and Ethel (Coleman) Spievack. He was diagnosed with rheumatic fever as a boy and developed a love of building model airplanes while confined to his room.

"He approached surgery with the same delicacy he employed in building model airplanes," said his older brother, Edwin of Dallas.

Dr. Spievack's work with salamanders won him a 1955 Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Bologna, Italy, the same year he was accepted at Harvard Medical School.

His father feared he would lose his Harvard placement if he deferred and gave his son an Austin-Healey convertible as inducement to bypass Bologna, the family said. Dr. Spievack got his Harvard medical degree in 1959.

Joanne Spievack said her husband of 20 years was an optimist with "a wonderful wit" and deep insights about life.

"He always had a story about everything. I loved his explanations for so many things," she said.

His dry sense of humor was embodied on the cover of a collection of essays he wrote as an undergraduate: "This will make good people feel bad and bad people feel worse."

He was a voracious reader, golfer, and lover of classical music. He could identify most of any composer's work as a result of Sunday afternoons that he was forced to listen to symphonies with his father as a boy, she said.

He also inherited his father's obsession with beautiful lawns, she added.

In 1981, a Middlesex jury ordered Dr. Spievack and another doctor to pay nearly $400,000 in damages to a Brookline woman for failing to diagnose a lump in her breast as cancer. An X-ray ordered by Dr. Spievack did not reveal the cancer.

The judge set aside the jury's verdict, but an appeals court in 1983 sided with experts who said Dr. Spievack should have ordered a biopsy.

Dr. Spievack was "devastated" by the case, his wife said, noting that biopsies were not standard care for breast lumps at the time.

His greatest disappointment, though, was not living long enough to see his research's ultimate potential, she said.

Dr. Spievack's eldest daughter, Lieutenant Bowen C. Spievack, of the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., said her father was devoted to improving patient care.

"He didn't want to rest on doing things the conventional way. He really focused on how can I make things better," she said.

She called him a "calming influence" whose methodical and logical approach to problems left those around him feeling relief and hope.

Dr. Spievack was married to Bowen's mother, Elizabeth Cahill of Rockport, from 1965 to 1986.

To Lee, his middle right finger is a constant reminder of his brother's genius.

"He gave my body the signal to heal itself. The only problem is I have to cut the fingernail every two days because it grows faster than the others," he said.

In addition to his brothers, daughter, and wife, Dr. Spievack leaves another daughter, Julianna of Cambridge.

Services have been held.