PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania – First stop: the spray gun that shoots out skin cells. Next, the blind man who "sees" by using his tongue. Finally, a shake of a marine's transplanted hand.

The nation's top military officer today took a look at some of the Pentagon's wildest medical research projects. But once the seemingly-sci-fi demonstrations at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center were over, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen voiced some concerns. The technologies and techniques seemed promising. But when would they be available, really, to help wounded veterans? And why did the corporal with the replacement hand have to rely on his girlfriend's mom to find out about his revolutionary treatment?

In 2008, the Department of Defense and academia set aside $250 million to set up a consortium to fund bleeding-edge research into the science of rebuilding human muscle, tissue, and minds. Today, that Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) project is beginning to show results. Whether those results will come in time for the tens of thousands of wounded veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq remains an open question.

"That's the challenge you always have with research: How do you get research to full production levels," Mullen said. "I'm satisfied we can. I'm not satisfied we're doing it rapidly enough. And one of the things I take away from this trip is to go back and see if I can push from where I am to roll this out more rapidly."

One of the researchers here, Dr. Douglas Kondziolka, mentioned it might be another decade before his treatment of transplanted brain cells might be widely available to troops who have suffered in war. The research was proceeding methodically. And approval for large-scale tests on human brains takes forever to obtain. Mullen seemed less than enthused. '"10 years doesn't satisfy any of us," he later said.

Konziolka's colleague Dr. Peter Rubin is using fat tissue and fat stem cells to reconstruct damaged faces; the first of Rubin's 20 trial patients underwent the procedure this month. Dr. Donald Marinelli has built a custom Wii game to test for traumatic brain injury. Corporal Isaias Hernandez has regrown most of a blown-apart quadriceps, thanks to a biologic scaffold developed here. He flexed it for the Admiral.

Dr. Alain Corcos took a silver rod, tipped with a glowing blue light. He pointed the rod at an easel of white paper, and squirted it with a fine blue mist. When the spray gun is loaded with a compressed air and solution of stem cells and epidermal progenitor cells, it can be used to assist the badly burned. The cells start to divide, eventually covering and healing an area far greater that a traditional skin graft. On one patient, a patch of spray-on skin the size of a postage stamp grew to repair an entire arm. The military has identified 40 troops for future trials, and 40 more civilians have been picked, as well.

Even more striking was white-haired Clarence "Butch" Schultz, who last served in the Navy in the 1950s. Since then, he lost sight in both of his eyes. But a device under investigation here has enabled his brain to route around his damaged eyes. The Brainport uses a digital video camera, housed on a pair of sunglasses, to collect visual data. The data is transmitted to a handheld unit, which converts the data to electrical impulses. Those impulses are then sent to an electrode array that's placed on the tongue (saliva is a great electrical conductor, and the tongue offers densely packed nerves to collect and transmit the impulses to the brain). The device then converts the data to pixels – and allows Schulz to experience the world. "I can actually see the difference between light and dark, between cement and black top, between the lawn and the driveway," Schultz said.

With Mullen and his wife and staff watching, Schultz put down his cane. He shuffled down a laboratory hallway, side-stepping a swivel-chair and a small garbage pail. He's planning a much longer walk this summer: a 1000-mile trip to his home in Florida.

Mullen was then introduced to Corporal Josh Maloney, an Iraq veteran who lost his right hand during a training exercise in 2007. He tried a couple of different prosthetic limbs as replacements. He couldn't deal with any of them – "worthless," he said. A little more than a year ago, doctors here gave him a transplanted hand from a cadaver. It's a tricky operation that not only involves the connection of tissue, muscle, nerves, and bone. It also means giving the patient an immunosuppressive cocktail, including cells from the donor's bone marrow, so that the new limb won't be rejected by its new host. In Maloney's case, it worked. "At eight months, I really started to get feeling [in the hand]. At nine months, I was playing Playstation again. Now I kick everyone's butt," he said.

But Maloney only found out about the Pentagon-backed effort to perform hand transplants through dumb luck. His girlfriend's mom worked at a hospital, and happened to pick up a brochure on the military's new regenerative medicine push. Otherwise, he'd still have only one hand.

"It shouldn't be incumbent on patients to find health care, like we heard with Josh," Mullen health and medicine aide Colonel Christian Macedonia said afterward.

And if military researchers can't figure out how to help large numbers of troops, those scientists may have trouble keeping their supply of Pentagon funds. The Department of Defense bankrolls thousands of promising science and technology programs every year. Most of them never make it beyond the lab. During the Pentagon's massive expansion after 9/11, the military could afford to keep all those projects on the books. Mullen said that might not be as possible in the years to come. The Pentagon's budget will inevitably shrink, as the America's troops come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. "So how do you protect what's important in an incredibly difficult budget environment and a difficult political environment, especially when it's stuff people don’t quite understand yet?" he asked. No one answered.

– Noah Shachtman and Katie Drummond

[Photos: Noah Shachtman, Specialist Chad J. McNeeley]