Eugene Bell, 88, a Creator of Skin Cells for Grafting, Dies

By JEREMY PEARCE
Eugene Bell, who helped develop a way to grow human skin for grafting onto wounds and later founded companies to make the technology commercially available, died on June 22 at his home in Boston. He was 88.
The cause was heart failure, his family said.
In the 1970s, Dr. Bell, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others at M.I.T. experimented with skin cells in an effort to generate replacement tissue for treating severe burns and other injuries. They were able to implant a patient’s own skin cells in a matrix of collagen gel and grow “skin equivalents” that included both dermal and epidermal cells.
Because the tissue was derived from the patients’ own cells, it did not set off an immune reaction and was not rejected by the body, and it was successfully used to treat patients.
Dr. Bell reported his team’s results in a widely cited article in the journal Science in 1981.
Dr. Bell and others later used similar techniques to generate thyroid tissue in laboratory rats.
Linda G. Griffith, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering at M.I.T., said Dr. Bell’s research “provided a vision and stimulation to the field of tissue engineering” that had the benefit of “ultimately being used therapeutically.”
After retiring from M.I.T. in 1986, Dr. Bell helped found a company, Organogenesis, of Canton, Mass., to produce replacement skin, other tissue and wound-healing products.
He later helped found another company in Boston, TEI Biosciences, which develops products for tissue repair and regeneration.
Dr. Bell was a former president and chief scientific officer of both companies.
Eugene Bell was born in the Bronx. He attended New York University and the University of Rhode Island before earning a doctorate in biology from Brown in 1954.
Dr. Bell joined M.I.T. in 1956 and was named a professor of biology there in 1967. He was also affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., where he became a senior scientist.
Dr. Bell is survived by his wife, the former Millicent Lang, a professor emerita of English at Boston University and a scholar of Henry James and Edith Wharton.
He is also survived by a son, Tony, of Seattle; a daughter, Meg Fofonoff of Dedham, Mass.; and four grandchildren.