Ioannis Yannas, who invented artificial skin for treatment of burns, has died

news.mit.edu

182 points

bookofjoe

a month ago


28 comments

infinet 25 days ago

To understand the significance of artificial skin, first consider all sorts of bad things that happen after deep burn. The dead tissue in a burn wound can release toxins and provide nutrients for bacteria to grow, which in turn can spread toxins and infection throughout the body, eventually causing multiple organ failure and death. Early treatment of deep burns focuses on interrupting this cascade reaction by removing the dead tissue. The now-cleaned wound needs to be covered. Skin from many species, including chicken, rat, pigeon, cat, dog, frog, cow, and pig, has been tested, and pig skin was found to be the best. As the wound's condition improves, healthy skin from the same patient is grafted or seeded onto the wound to assist healing. Although pig skin is still widely used, the biggest problem is that it is from a different species and therefore can be immune rejected. Gene-edited pig skin helps, but it may still require immunosuppressive therapy, which is not helpful when the patient is at high risk of infection.

Artificial skin has the potential for better temporary wound cover, and ideally, it can promote healing without skin grafting or using less skin for grafting.

  • antegamisou 25 days ago

    [flagged]

    • squigz 25 days ago

      The real slop is dragging AI into every conversation.

      • antegamisou 25 days ago
        17 more

        The whole frontpage has been infested with LLM BS for a very long time with absurd claims about it being of landing-on-the-moon levels of breakthrough yet here you are claiming the ones pointing out this fact are the problem.

        • squigz 25 days ago
          2 more

          Pointing out this fact at every possible opportunity, even when grossly inappropriate, is not helpful.

          • antegamisou 24 days ago

            [Someone from the moderation team care to explain the reasoning behind flagging this comment?]

            Characterizing as grossly inappropriate the statement of the reality of the monopoly on research funding on useless -as of now- AI and not even addressing the initial point is very telling of your dedication to VC brainwashing.

        • zamadatix 24 days ago
          12 more

          The whole front page has not been any one topic. Just as the whole of the comments on every submission don't bring up AI either. It's just annoying how relatively often both occur, but neither group seems interested on reigning it in any time soon.

          • antegamisou 24 days ago
            11 more

            [Someone from the moderation team care to explain the reasoning behind flagging this comment?]

            Your judgement concerning the state of the website since the release of GPT3 is flawed. Just take a look at the amount of comments on non-AI topics like the current one. Not counting yours truly, it's a very low volume conversation for a website for the discussion of stories that are intellectually interesting.

            • zamadatix 24 days ago
              9 more

              Flagging almost always happens by users, and the mod team can only guess why users flag comments. In the only one still currently flagged (dead/grayed out just means people voted it too low) it's pretty obvious why - you can't just curse how stupid others are or the person you're responding to and expect it to be a valued comment brought to the top. (I didn't flag/downvote any of your comments).

              3 of the current top 25 articles (at the time of this comment) are about something AI related (ChatGPT 5.1, Marble and JSX Tool). It's all relatively low volume, it's just never ending is the problem.

              • antegamisou 24 days ago
                8 more

                As of 1763032813 the current GPT5.1 has amassed a significant amount of comments to be considered low volume. Sadly I only see my suspicions being confirmed but yeah I'll play along with the HN is the best corner of the Internet narrative.

                • squigz 24 days ago
                  2 more

                  I believe GP meant low volume in the context of # of submissions, not comments.

                  However, on that note, as of writing this, the GPT 5.1 submission on the front page has 471 comments. The submission about pennies no longer being minted has 853.

                  • zamadatix 23 days ago

                    Yes, thank you. The number of submissions where looking through it results in someone talking about how great/horrible AI is. Not the number of times someone continues to bring up and discuss AI in the same submission.

                • zamadatix 23 days ago
                  5 more

                  I don't know if it's my job to define what discussion topics define the best corner of the internet, but I'm glad anyways you're willing to play along and reduce the number of times AI is brought into the comments!

                  • antegamisou 23 days ago
                    4 more

                    Yeah you can count on my reticence, everything seem to be going back to normal.

                    Oh wait what is that?!

                    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917875

                    Another low volume slop news day! Maybe I'm more influential than I previously thought..

                    • zamadatix 23 days ago
                      3 more

                      Well, I can count on you being reserved only once you do accept sending me more links about how other people talk about AI only continues your half. If everyone makes noise about how the other side hasn't quieted down yet so they won't the only outcome is it gets ever louder, as this never ending comment chain about AI has already proven.

                      • antegamisou 22 days ago
                        2 more

                        > If everyone makes noise about how the other side hasn't quieted down yet so they won't the only outcome is it gets ever louder

                        Yes, we shouldn't be pointing out the low-value content and enshittification brought upon by this superior technology, or even question why isn't research focused on addressing challenges like disease and poverty eradication, cause we bring more attention to any potential negative aspects, which are obviously very minimal and exaggerated. We should just accept dogmata about having to reconcile with the idea that humans have eventually lost in some absurd creativity/imagination race against the superior AGI machines and it's perfectly reasonable having negative IQ CEOs laying off thousands because AI does their job "better" (costs cheaper) than them. I'm sure paying no attention and magically letting it die on its own is the solution. Just like it has historically happened with other subjects like phrenology, scientific racism, antisemitism etc.

                        What are you even doing here, enjoy another trite useless application offered to you as another breakthrough that I'm obviously responsible for having 1.5K upvotes cause I can't shut up.

                        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930151

                        • zamadatix 20 days ago

                          The problem was never whether people should discuss the value of AI (from either side even, as much as I don't want to hear about it myself) in the right places, it was how AI conversation constantly gets dragged outside its box! Recall the original comment which responded to you, being in a thread completely unrelated to AI:

                          > The real slop is dragging AI into every conversation.

                          By all means - debate AI in an AI thread or make thread about how much AI sucks and discuss it there. Just don't insist on bringing AI into even more places it shouldn't be as if that's going to solve the very problem of AI discussion being too common to avoid! It's easy enough to avoid an entire AI thread and its hundreds of comments at a glance but, thanks to people like you who don't respect the point of separating discussions of different topics into different places, it's impossible to feel you can go read something and know you'll avoid hearing about how great/horrible AI is in ANY conversation! 100% possibility annoyance in any place on HN sure is a lot worse to deal with than seeking out and posting links just to show actually easy to avoid annoyance is not exactly 0%.

                          This is why you're continued use of additional links to more AI trite in this thread is so ironic/opposing to the goal, not because I think AI needs fewer critics pointing things out in the relevant discussions.

        • MichaelZuo 25 days ago
          2 more

          So why do you want to drag debates about that into even closer to 100% of all posts?

pfdietz 24 days ago

Someone close to me needed an artificial skin product (I think it was a subsequent generation product, not this one) to close a stubbornly unhealed wound on their lower leg. It worked like a charm after previous treatments had failed. Big QoL improvement.