Skin regeneration born out of horrible burns

Dr. Howard Green, a Harvard scientist who made an accidental discovery that led to a method for regenerating human skin and saving the lives of severe burn victims, has died. He was 90.

Green’s technique involved taking a patch of skin the size of a postage stamp and, under meticulously controlled laboratory conditions, growing it into a sheet the size of a desktop. Risks of rejection fell dramatically because a patient’s laboratory-grown skin originated with the patient herself.

“The entire embryonic stem-cell field is rooted in Green’s findings,” according to a statement Monday from Harvard Medical School, where he led the department of cellular and molecular physiology from 1980 to 1993. He continued doing research in his laboratory at the school until 2013.

Green died Oct. 31after a long illness, his family said. He lived in a Westwood, Mass., retirement community.

Green became internationally known in 1983, when three boys in Casper, Wyo., were severely burned while roaming through a house that was being renovated. Just for fun, they had daubed themselves with paint. When they tried to scrub it off with lighter fluid, one of them struck a match, triggering an explosive fireball.

The two surviving boys — brothers Jamie and Glen Selby, 5 and 7 — were airlifted to a Denver hospital and then to the Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston. Green and his team had successfully done a few small, experimental procedures on burn victims but now mounted a desperate effort that was the boys’ only chance for survival.

Green turned his lab into an around-the-clock skin fabrication facility. The boys underwent lengthy operations and hundreds of grafts. It was an agonizing ordeal, but both survived.

Green had never participated in anything like it. But the boys’ condition was dire. Green was stunned when he saw them, burned everywhere but their armpits, the soles of their feet and the creases at the top of their thighs.

“I had no choice,” he later said. “I had to try.”

Born in Toronto, on Sept.10,1925, Green never sought to treat patients. He studied medicine at the University of Toronto so he could pursue medical research. He spent time at New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking his position at Harvard.

While he was at MIT, he became intrigued by teratomas, tumours that can include partly formed teeth, bones, even hair. He and a graduate student, James Rheinwald, were studying them in mice when Rheinwald spotted keratinocytes — a basic building block of skin that had never been successfully raised in a culture. The two managed to do it. “Although it may seem unlikely that the study of a mouse tumour could lead to a treatment for burned humans, the two subjects were linked in a way that could not have been foreseen,” Green later wrote in Scientific American.

The mouse study led to experiments with human cells taken from the discarded foreskins of circumcised newborns. And though Green later said he never saw himself as a scientist “concerned with practical problems,” he realized immediately that he and his colleagues were on the verge of an important discovery.

“Once you can grow vast amounts of human skin cells in culture, you have to ask yourself what you can do with them,” Green told the Harvard Gazette in 2010.