12/27/2025
Innovation in medicine
She had five days to save twenty-eight people whose bodies had been burned beyond what medicine was supposed to handle. Traditional treatment would take weeks. They did not have weeks. So she sprayed new skin onto their wounds and forced burn medicine to change.
Her name was Fiona Wood.
October 12, 2002. Bali, Indonesia. Two bombs exploded in a crowded tourist district packed with nightclubs and restaurants. The blasts killed 202 people almost instantly. Hundreds more were injured. Many were burned so badly that large portions of their skin were destroyed entirely.
Among the survivors were twenty-eight people whose injuries were so severe they were evacuated across the ocean to Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia. They arrived sedated, wrapped in dressings, bodies swollen and raw, with third-degree burns covering enormous areas of skin. Some had lost more than half of their protective barrier against infection.
Fiona Wood was head of the hospital’s burns unit. When the patients arrived, she immediately understood the numbers that mattered most.
Severe burns are not only injuries. They are ticking clocks. Once skin is gone, bacteria have a direct path into the body. Infection leads to organ failure. Organ failure leads to death. The usual solution is skin grafting, cutting healthy skin from one part of the patient’s body and transplanting it onto the burned areas.
But these patients did not have enough healthy skin left.
Even worse, the alternative technique used for large burns involved growing sheets of new skin cells in a laboratory. That process took weeks. These patients would not survive weeks.
They had days.
Wood had spent most of her career confronting this exact problem. Since the 1990s, she had treated burn victims whose suffering extended far beyond the initial injury. Traditional grafting created new wounds on already traumatized bodies. Recovery was slow. Scarring was extensive. Children endured surgery after surgery. Adults spent months in pain, often emerging physically healed but psychologically devastated.
She refused to accept that this was the best medicine could offer.
Working alongside medical scientist Marie Stoner, Wood began developing a radically different approach. Instead of cutting away large sheets of skin, what if they only needed a tiny sample. Instead of waiting weeks for skin to grow into sheets, what if cells could be expanded in days. Instead of stitching grafts into place, what if skin could be applied evenly, directly, without additional trauma.
The idea sounded almost absurd.
Spray skin.
They refined the process slowly, carefully. A biopsy the size of a postage stamp was taken from the patient’s healthy skin. The cells were separated and cultured rapidly in the lab. Within days, millions of skin cells were suspended in a liquid solution. Using a handheld device resembling an airbrush, the cells could be sprayed directly onto the wound.
Once applied, the cells adhered to the wound bed and began growing new skin.
The technique healed faster. It reduced scarring. It spared patients the agony of large donor wounds. It worked in small cases.
But nothing in their research had prepared them for Bali.
When the bombing survivors arrived, Wood and her team were forced to act at the very edge of what medicine allowed. There was no time for caution, no luxury of delay. Every hour increased the risk of infection and death.
They took biopsies from each patient. While the cells were growing, the burns unit became a battlefield. Staff worked around the clock controlling pain, preventing infection, stabilizing organs, and keeping bodies alive long enough for the cells to be ready.
Then Wood did something no one had ever done on this scale.
She sprayed new skin onto massive burn wounds.
Not one patient. Not two. Twenty-eight.
The cells took hold. New skin began forming across areas once considered impossible to heal. Wounds that would normally require months of surgeries started closing. Infection rates dropped. Bodies stabilized.
Every single one of the twenty-eight critically burned patients survived.
In burn medicine, that outcome was almost unheard of.
The results shocked the medical world. A technique that had sounded experimental and fragile had saved lives where standard treatment would almost certainly have failed. The phrase “spray-on skin” spread across headlines, sounding futuristic and unreal.
For Fiona Wood, it was never about spectacle.
She had seen what untreated suffering looked like. She had seen patients endure endless operations. She had seen families watch loved ones disappear into months of pain. Speed mattered. Dignity mattered. Healing was not just about survival but about how people lived afterward.
Spray-on skin changed all of that.
Patients healed faster. Fewer surgeries were required. Scarring was dramatically reduced. Psychological recovery improved because bodies no longer carried the same visible reminders of trauma.
The innovation was both medical and human.
In the aftermath, Wood received international recognition. She was named a National Living Treasure in Australia. In 2005, she was awarded Australian of the Year. But she continued working, refining the technology, improving techniques, and mentoring the next generation of burn surgeons.
Today, variations of spray-on skin are used in burn units around the world. What once sounded impossible is now part of standard practice. Children recover faster. Adults return to their lives sooner. Injuries that once meant permanent damage now carry hope.
None of this happened by accident.
It happened because Fiona Wood looked at accepted limits and refused them. Because she spent years preparing for a moment she could not predict. Because when twenty-eight lives arrived on stretchers with no margin for failure, she was ready to try something new.
She did not promise a miracle.
She built one, piece by piece, cell by cell, long before the world knew it needed it.
She had five days to save twenty-eight people.
She sprayed new skin onto their wounds.
And burn medicine has never been the same since.
