SOUTH DENNIS, Mass.

RESEARCHERS at leading colleges, including my alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, have joined with the biotech industry to study limb regeneration under a Department of Defense contract. This is still another case of things we have only imagined now coming within reach of modern science.

When I was a kid, I saw a movie called Night Monster, in which a murder occurred every time the fog rolled into a small English town from the moors. The constable was understandably perplexed because he had no real suspects. The murders took place around the manor of a quadruple amputee who was totally bedridden.

In a surprising twist at the end, the amputee turned out to be the murderer. It seems he had fought with the British Army in India and learned from a fakir how to use his body’s energy to temporarily regenerate his lost limbs — just long enough to go out and kill the next hapless victim.

Life continues to imitate art, from Jules Verne’s stories of submarines and travel to the moon to H.G. Wells’s fascinating story of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the mad scientist who created hybrid creatures, part human and part animal.

Continuing with radical, cutting-edge research, which previously belonged only in the science-fiction realm, the colleges have joined with a biotech firm to study limb regeneration under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The researchers will investigate tissue restoration, including the regeneration of digits and limbs lost or damaged because of traumatic injury. DARPA is understandably interested in this work, considering the increasingly large number of military personnel who have lost limbs or suffered other major tissue damage.

The colleges involved in this research include Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Tulane University, University of California-Irvine, and University of Louisville. CellThera, a Worcester-based company, is working closely with Worcester Tech’s bioengineering researchers.

Tissue regeneration is a natural function for the salamander, the only vertebrate that can re-grow functional limbs as an adult. The researchers will be taking a close look at this phenomenon, wherein limb restoration begins with a “bud,” a blastema consisting of a mass of cells capable of growth, much like stem cells. This same type of bud has been observed when a small child loses a fingertip; but the ability to regenerate vanishes by adulthood.

The researchers will start by trying to initiate tissue regeneration in a mouse, which will be their mammalian model. They will try to trigger the development of a blastema and regenerate lost digits in the mouse.

If this first step is successful, they hope to eventually expand the process to other mammalian models, with the ultimate objective of regenerating digits, and hopefully entire limbs, in humans. Obviously this is a long-term endeavor, the goal of which would have been undreamed of just a few years ago.

One disquieting aspect is that this type of research goes hand in hand with embryonic stem-cell research, which the federal government thus far has refused to fund on supposed ethical or religious grounds. Tell that to someone who has already given an arm and a leg for his fellow man.

But I have spoken with some of these researchers at WPI this past summer. While pig-headed politicians may come and go, I know that science and dedicated scientists will eventually prevail.

Solon Economou, a frequent contributor, is an engineer and Cape Cod-based writer ( capecodder1@hotmail.com).