HEALING WITHOUT SCARS

Healing a wound without leaving a scar is something we could all do while in the womb. But unlocking this ability after birth has proven impossible. Until now...

- by HAYLEY BENNETT

Plastic surgeon Dr Michael Longaker was an undergraduate at Michigan State University in 1979. Now renowned for his work on scarring, back then Longaker's interests lay more in sports than scientific research – that year he played with basketball superstar Earvin 'Magic' Johnson on his college team, the Spartans. “I had no background in research, at all,” he says, “I was forced into the lab.”

After his medical degree, he reluctantly took up a one-year research post in the lab of paediatric surgeon Dr Michael Harrison, who was carrying out lifesaving operations on babies in the womb. He started seeing something surprising: when these babies were born, they didn't have any scars from their surgeries. So Harrison said to Longaker, “Why don't you look at how we heal before we are born?”

Longaker's reservations about research were soon forgotten. He operated on foetal lambs and other unborn animals, becoming caught up in the idea of 'scarless healing' in the womb. His one year in the lab became four.

Harrison's group wasn't the first to report scarless healing. The same year Longaker played with 'Magic' Johnson, an American pathologist published a paper about a baby boy born at an Illinois hospital when his mother was only 20 weeks pregnant. The baby was sadly stillborn and, due to a rare condition where the amniotic sac gets wrapped around the foetus, suffered leg and finger amputations. But his wounds had healed without scars.

These discoveries in scarless healing led scientists to wonder: if we can heal without scars before we're born, is there some way of switching that ability back on outside the womb? This question has occupied Longaker's thinking for four decades. Today, at Stanford University in California, he says he gets “hundreds of emails a month” from people asking about their scars. He's made it his life's work to help them.