Talk:Artificial skin

article is about 2 different things

At the moment it's a mix of vat grown skin and semiconductor skin, which are different things entirely. The article should just be about one or the other. Bhny (talk) 22:57, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Agreed Tayloj11 (talk) 03:53, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Paragraph needs rewriting. but I'm not sure how.

The following paragraph needs rewriting, but I'm not sure how to fix it. This is a garbled version of the text at the cited source, http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/Apg-Ban/Artificial-Skin.html, and that text appears to be a garbled copy of something else, perhaps http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Artificial_skin.aspx . Clearly people have been copying and rewriting badly in a chain.

Synthetic skin was invented by John F. Burke, chief of Trauma Services in Massachusetts General Hospital. He was assisted by Ioannis V. Yannas, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the 1970s, they created a polymer with collagen fibers and sugar molecules. A small porous was formed. When the porous was placed on the wound, skin cells around it seemed to encourage a faster healing process. This allowed the healing process to continue at a much faster rate. They also created a skin from shark cartilage and cowhide. When this skin dried and was sterilized, it could be made into a thin membrane in which materials could pass through like with the original dermis. Silicone was then added to create a protective top layer to represent the epidermis. This added layer protected the new dermis as well as the inner fluids of the body. The synthetic dermis allowed blood vessels to grow, but couldn’t produce hair follicles or sweat glands.[1]

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The source of the garbled material above, http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/Apg-Ban/Artificial-Skin.html appears to have been taken from a less garbled article at http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/93/Artificial-skin.html as below:

The first synthetic skin was invented by John F. Burke, chief of Trauma Services at MassachusettsGeneral Hospital, and Ioannis V. Yannas, chemistry professor at MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. Seeing so many burn victims during his career, Burke had long been seeking a replacement for human skin that would prevent infection and dehydration. Meanwhile, Ioannis Yannas had been studying collagen, aprotein found in human skin. Teaming up during the 1970s, the two found thatcollagen fibers and a long sugar molecule (called a polymer) could be combined to form a porous material that resembled skin and, when placed on wounds of lab animals, seemed to encourage the growth of new skin cells around it. The pair then created a kind of artificial skin using polymers from shark cartilage and collagen from cowhide. Using their synthetic material, called Silastic, Burke and Yannas continued experimenting and found that artificialskin acts like a framework onto which new skin tissue and blood vessels grow, although these new cells are unable to produce hair follicles or sweat glands normally formed in the dermis. As the new skin grows, the cowhide and shark substances from the artificial skin are broken down and absorbed by the body. In 1979 Burke and Yannas used their artificial skin on their first patient, a woman who had suffered burns over half her body. After peeling away her burned skin, Burke applied a layer of artificial skin and, where possible, grafted to it some of her own unburned skin. Three weeks later, the woman's newskin, the same color as her unburned skin, was growing at an amazingly healthy rate. Chuck Baggett (talk) 00:05, 1 July 2014 (UTC)