当年和Dr. Howard Green有着同样的志向，奔向医学研究。
Howard Green, Who Found a Way to Grow Skin and Saved Lives, Dies at 90
By SAM ROBERTSNOV. 5, 2015
Dr. Howard Green, at Harvard around 1984, discovered how to regenerate skin
that could be grafted onto burn victims.
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 M.I.T.
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 Dr. Green, who by then was at
Harvard Medical School, was determined to give the boys a chance with so-
called test-tube skin. “I had no choice,” he said, “I had to try.”
Dr. 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.
“I knew that without our skin, those kids didn’t have a hope in hell,” Dr
. O’Connor told People magazine in 1984. (Patients’ immune systems can
reject skin grafts from other people.)
Dr. Green was stunned by Jamie’s and Glen’s 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,” Dr. Green wrote, the boys returned home.
Without Dr. Green’s grafts, Dr. 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,
Dr. 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.
“It’s really the first stem cell therapy,” Dr. O’Connor said.
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 United States 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.
Dr. Green was a professor of cell biology at M.I.T. 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, Dr. Green said that he and an
M.I.T. 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.
Dr. 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.
“Once we learned how to grow the cells, it was obvious what we were going
to do,” Dr. Green told The Harvard Gazette. “Use them for people with
third-degree burns.”
In 1979, with Dr. Susan Schlegel, Dr. Green experimented with mice. He, Dr.
O’Connor and Dr. John B. Mulliken, at what was then Peter Bent Brigham
Hospital in Boston, and Dr. G. Gregory Gallico III, at the Shriners hospital
, then tried small samples on humans.
In 1981, Dr. Green and a former graduate student, Olaniyi Kehinde, patented
a process to treat burn victims with a sheet of living skin grown from the
victims’ own epidermal cells.
The Selby boys presented the greatest challenge.
“We weren’t prepared to do it on that scale because we did not have the
trained manpower,” Dr. Green told The New York Times in 1984, “but we
agreed to try because the boys had no chance to survive otherwise.”
After turning his Harvard laboratory into a manufacturing plant to supply
the two boys, Dr. Green founded BioSurface Technology to grow skin for
grafts. The company was bought by Genzyme in 1994.
Dr. Green’s death, in a retirement community in Westwood, Mass., was
confirmed by his wife, the former Rosine Kauffmann. The cause was acute
respiratory failure. He is also survived by his younger brother, Floyd.
In 2010, Dr. Green won the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, which came with $
200,000; two years later, he shared the March of Dimes Prize in
Developmental Biology, a $250,000 award, with Elaine Fuchs of the
Rockefeller University in Manhattan.
“I’m 86,” Dr. Green said at the time. “I plan to spend it as quickly as
possible.”
