Howard Green, who gave hope to burn victims, dies
On July 1, 1983, two young brothers and a friend were exploring a derelict house in their Casper, Wyo., neighborhood when they stumbled on several seductive cans of paint in a cupboard. Mischievously, they splashed the paint on the walls and, inevitably, on themselves.
Playtime over, they stripped and smeared themselves with a flammable solvent, to destroy the evidence before heading home. But then one of them struck a match in the darkness of the house, sparking an inferno. The boys were engulfed in what the police described as “one big ball of flames.”
Jamie Selby, 5, and his brother, Glen, 7, suffered third-degree burns — the most severe type, in which skin is destroyed — over 97 percent of their bodies. Their friend, who was 6, died in a hospital two days later.
The children were treated at the Shriners Burns Institute in Denver, then flown in a private jet to what is now the Shriners Hospitals for Children in Boston, where their lives were saved because of another accident, one that had occurred nine years earlier in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There, during a failed experiment to replicate a rare mouse tumor, an MIT researcher, Dr. Howard Green — who died at 90 on Oct. 31 — had discovered an unexpected dividend: the ability to regenerate human skin that could be grafted onto burn victims.
By the time of the Selby case, in 1983, the procedure had been tried successfully on human patients using only small patches of laboratory-grown skin. Never had it been tried on the scale demanded by the treatment of those young brothers.
Few of the attending doctors were hopeful, but Green, who by then was at Harvard Medical School, was determined to give the boys a chance with socalled test-tube skin.
“I had no choice,” he said, “I had to try.”
Green had devoted his career to clinical research and had never practiced on patients. Dr. Nicholas O’Connor, a plastic surgeon, had the task of performing the transplants at the Shriners hospital.
Green was stunned by their scorched bodies.
“I went to the hospital to see the boys, and I had never seen anything like that in my life,” he said in a Harvard Medical School video. “And yet, in as desperate a condition as they were, one of the boys, as he was being taken to the operating room, he said to the nurse, ‘Please don’t let me die.’”
Stamp-size squares of healthy skin were removed from each boy’s armpits, soles and thighs to cultivate, for each, a square yard of laboratory-cultured cells. It covered roughly half the burns. The process, slow and painstaking, was then repeated.
After about a year, and after enduring “the terrible suffering of the temporary skinless state,” Green wrote, the boys returned home.
Without Green’s grafts, O’Connor said of the boys, “there’s no question they would have died.”
The Selby brothers both lived for about another 20 years, ultimately dying, Green wrote, “of complications not directly related to their burns.”
His inadvertent discovery of substitute skin inspired stem cell research that produced other practical applications for regenerated tissue. It enabled scientists, for instance, to restore damaged eyesight by growing corneal stem cells and to develop gene therapy for disabling skin disease.
Howard Green was born on Sept. 10, 1925, in Toronto, the son of Benjamin Green and the former Rose Florence, who ran a clothing store. After high school, he enrolled in the University of Toronto medical school — reluctantly, he said, having wanted to pursue pure research instead.
But he later told The Boston Globe, referring to the skin grafts: “If I had not gone to medical school, I might not have had the courage to take this on. It gave me more confidence I could treat humans.”
After receiving a doctorate in medicine from the University of Toronto in 1947, he did his internship at a Chicago hospital (frequently doing ambulance duty) and served in the U.S. Army as a captain. He was later recruited by the New York University School of Medicine, where he became chairman of the department of cell biology.
Green was a professor of cell biology at MIT from 1970 to 1980 and chairman of the cell biology department at Harvard Medical School from 1980 to 1993. He remained a professor there until 2013.
Recalling his skin-regeneration breakthrough, Green said that he and an MIT graduate student, James G. Rheinwald, were trying to replicate mouse tumors when he and another colleague, Dr. Burton D. Goldberg, realized that they had instead grown epithelial cells, which form the outer layer of skin.
Green and his colleagues produced a nutrient brew in which the epithelial cells would replicate 10,000-fold within weeks. The substitute skin was grown in gauze sheets covered with petroleum jelly.