Recalling a lab-led rescue
His young body ravaged by fire, the boy looked at the nurse wheeling him into the operating room. “Don’t let me die.” The words have echoed through the decades, from a Boston operating room in the summer of 1983 to similar places around the world where similar sentiments have accompanied similar operations. They finally land in a neat house on a quiet Brookline street, where a Harvard Medical School (HMS) professor’s wife repeats the words as she tells the story. Those words changed everything, she adds. It was either 5-year-old Jamie Selby or his brother, 6-year-old Glen, who spoke on that summer day. The plea’s power rather than who said it struck the doctors and nurses caring for them. The adults were attempting what they deemed the boys’ only hope: transplanting laboratory-grown skin created through a new procedure pioneered by Professor Howard Green. It had been tried in small test cases before, but in those,...