A scientist who was scalped by an industrial machine has revealed the horrifying moment she walked into her lab carrying her own scalp.
Dr Pia Winberg was working inside a converted paper mill factory when her hair became caught in a high-powered drive shaft.
The 55-year-old had her scalp torn from her skull in the freak accident.
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Despite catastrophic blood loss, Pia managed to free herself from the machine, pick up her detached scalp and walk 200 metres to a nearby laboratory to ask a colleague to call an ambulance.
The scientist has detailed how the fateful day unfolded.
“I was wearing my factory cap, protective eyewear and hearing protection,” Pia, from Narrawallee, Australia, told Need To Know.
Dr Pia Winberg before accident. (Jam Press/PhycoHealth)
“I assumed that the small ball grip at the end of the valve handle unthreaded, and rolled under the machine.
“Why else I would have been on my knees with my head just above floor level?
“That’s where I found myself.
“The next memory was a just sense of frustration, as I tried to work out why my hair felt like it was tangled in two directions in something.
“I brought my hands down in front of me.
“In confusion, I wondered why my hands were completely covered in red – that was when my memory stopped again.
“I must have managed to extract my hair, remove my scalp and its hair from the machine, and walked, holding it, 200 metres to the lab building.
Dr Pia Winbergs scalped head. (Jam Press/PhycoHealth)
“I opened the door and said my colleague Rachel’s name, after which my memory stops.”
At the time, in February 2019, the scientist was developing seaweed-based gels designed to help repair damaged tissue and improve wound healing.
The accident happened in a pilot factory she had built inside a disused 1950s paper mill in New South Wales.
According to Rachel, Pia appeared terrifyingly calm despite being drenched in blood.
Pia said: “I turned and walked down the corridor to my office chair.
“Rachel ran after me and it was then that she could see my skull sticking out of the top of my head, and my scalp and mobile phone in my hands in my lap.
Dr Pia Winberg. (Jam Press/PhycoHealth)
“She understood then that it was me who had had the accident and she acted fast.”
Four ambulances arrived within 10 minutes, followed by a rescue helicopter.
Paramedics spent hours battling to stabilise her blood pressure before she could be flown to Sydney’s St George Hospital.
Doctors attempted to reattach her scalp during six hours of emergency surgery, but the blood vessels had been too badly damaged.
Instead, surgeons performed a split-skin graft using skin taken from her thigh, stapling it directly onto her skull while vacuum pressure forced the tissue to bond.
Without living tissue, her skull bone itself would have died.
But in a remarkable twist, the scientist believes her own seaweed-based research helped transform her recovery.
Pia said: “When the dressings could be removed a week later, I went straight into using my seaweed gel moisturiser across the whole mesh graft site, and it healed so well that I say I had baby skin across my head and not a single scar from the mesh skin pattern.
“Not that having a baby’s bottom effect across my head was ideal, but it was still amazing.
“I kept using the cream, until a year later, because skin remodelling takes as long as that after trauma.”
Over the next year, she underwent six further reconstructive surgeries as doctors slowly stretched surviving scalp tissue across her skull using inflatable expanders filled weekly with saline.
Pia said: “They approached this by implanting expander bags under the side patch of hair and scalp tissue that remained on one side.
“These bags were expanded to stretch the scalp with hair on it slowly, by injecting 10ml of saline each week.
Dr Pia Winberg. (Jam Press/PhycoHealth)
“After the bag was filled to a litre of water and I had a giant hair balloon on the side of my head, a fourth surgery could remove the balloon, detach 90% of the baby skin graft tissue, and extend the stretched, real, scalp tissue with hair over to the other side of my skull to reattach once again.
“After this, another two surgeries tidied it up, and today there is just one four centimetre patch of baby skin, thigh graft tissue on my skull.
“The rest is extended true scalp with my own hair, thinned a bit, but with feeling and better thickness than thigh skin, which was thin and with no nerves or sensation.”
Her current research now focuses on SXRG84, a seaweed-derived gel that appears to mimic molecules involved in human tissue repair, hydration and collagen production.
Pia said: “Before the accident, I thought of the scalp mainly as the place that held hair.
“After losing mine, I learned that the scalp is far more than that.
“It’s a living, sensory, vascular organ wrapped over the skull, thick, richly innervated, full of hair follicles, blood vessels, glands and connective tissue.
“The scalp helps protect the skull and brain, regulates heat, senses touch and temperature, and anchor the hair that shields us from sun, cold and environmental exposure.
“Losing my scalp changed more than my appearance.
“I experienced vertigo and a strange disconnection from the top of my own head.
“Hair movement activates nerve endings around the follicle, making hair-covered skin sensitive to light touch, brushing, air movement and subtle environmental contact.
“I had to relearn touch, pressure and position across my skull.
“The map of my head had been redrawn.
“I could feel my brain learning where I was again.
“That experience changed the way I understood skin.”
Scientists at PhycoHealth, the company Pia founded, are investigating whether the marine gel could help burns victims, chronic wounds and chemotherapy-damaged tissue.
Pia added: “Skin is not wrapping paper, it’s an organ of sensation, immunity, temperature control, communication and repair.
“The scalp, in particular, is a remarkable interface between the brain and the outside world.
“It tells us about pressure, wind, warmth, danger, touch and even the subtle presence of our body in space.
“I became, unwillingly, a patient inside the very clinical world I was trying to help and experiencing the challenge from the frontline.
“I saw the brilliance of surgeons and emergency clinicians, but also the limits of what medicine currently has available when large areas of complex tissue are lost.
“A split-skin graft can save life and cover bone, but it does not replace full scalp tissue, hair follicles, thickness, sensation, glands, elasticity or the original sensory map of the body.
“That’s why our research now matters to me in a completely different way.
“We’re investigating how these marine glycans can support skin repair, collagen protection, inflammation control, microbiome balance and even 3D-printed full-thickness skin models.
“What began as ecological science, cultivating seaweed to transform waste nutrients into valuable biology, became deeply personal.
“I now understand skin as one of the most intelligent organs of the body.
“And I understand healing not only as closing a wound, but as restoring structure, sensation, identity and connection to the world.”
