Professor Eugene Bell

Founder of tissue engineering

Eugene Bell, biologist: born New York 20 October 1918; Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1967-83, 1991-93 (Emeritus); married 1941 Millicent Lang (one son, one daughter); died Boston, Massachusetts 22 June 2007.

Eugene Bell, Emeritus Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was the founding father of the science of tissue engineering – making new tissue for badly injured patients. He founded two biotechnology companies, Organogenesis and TEI Biosciences, to make his inventions commercially available. Bell and his wife, Millicent, gave $1m to MIT to fund a chair in tissue engineering and $400,000 to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts to fund a postgraduate studentship. He held over 40 patents on his inventions and was principal author of 200 papers.

Bell's 1981 paper "Living Tissue formed in vitro and accepted as skin-equivalent tissue of full thickness", in the journal Science, brought him world-wide acclaim and has been cited over 400 times. In it, he and colleagues showed how to repair extensive skin wounds with a laboratory-cultured artificial skin made with some of the patient's own skin cells, placed in a complex collagen gel that he had developed, and which does not provoke an immune reaction. This became the basis of an entire generation of studies aimed at regenerating every kind of tissue, from cartilage and bone to nerve and liver. In 2003 New York University awarded him the prize for biotechnology achievement of the year.

Bell was born in the Bronx, New York in 1918 and educated in the state system at DeWitt Clinton High School. Even as a young man, he wanted to make the world a better place. He entered New York University to study physics and maths, and interrupted his course to join the US Army, serving on the front line in the Philippines and New Guinea. He sustained a shrapnel wound in his hand that remained for the rest of his life. The army then sent him to officer training school in Sydney, Australia and he returned at a first lieutenant.

He returned to finish his university course in 1947, graduating a year later. He went on to an MSc at Rhode Island University and a PhD at Brown University on Rhode Island. He then joined MIT, where he stayed until 1983, spending 1959-60 at Glasgow University and 1967-68 at Palermo University on visiting fellowships.

During the 1970s he made several hundred outstanding scientific films with the Boston Educational Development Center; 10 of these won awards at film festivals. They were praised for their aesthetic as well as scientific quality and were used extensively in schools for many years. He maintained a laboratory at Woods Hole marine biological laboratory over these years, and taught courses for advance students.

Aged 65, he took "early retirement" from MIT to found a biotech company, Organogenesis. He left Organogenesis in 1991 and returned briefly to MIT, then in 1993 founded a second company, TEI Biosciences of Boston. Between them, the two companies market products for repairing tendons, the surface membrane of the brain, hernia repair, pelvic floor reconstruction, wound management, and plastic and reconstructive surgery. They sell a human skin model for testing drugs and cosmetics. They sell products that kick-start the healing process in chronic wounds such as leg ulcers, pressure sores and diabetic foot ulcers, natural materials for tissue repair that are replacing the Gore-Tex and Dacron in current use. Bell's most recent scientific research focused on the pluripotency of a subset of adult stem cells.

Bell met his wife, Millicent Lang, during a philosophy course in his first year at university. They married a year later, in 1941. She is Professor Emerita of English at Boston University and the author of books on Henry James and Edith Wharton.

He played baseball and basketball when he was young, sailed and swam – in the sea in summer, in the MIT pool in winter. He cooked, and he and his wife entertained widely, especially at their summer home on Cape Cod.

Caroline Richmond