Woman scalped in freak accident carried her personal torn pores and skin 200 metres to seek out assist

WARNING, GRAPHIC CONTENT: Dr Pia Winberg had her scalp torn from her skull in a freak industrial accident and carried it 200 metres to her lab to call an ambulance

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A scientist who was scalped by an industrial machine has shared the terrifying moment she walked into her lab carrying her own scalp.

Dr Pia Winberg found herself in a horrific situation when her hair got entangled in a high-powered drive shaft while working inside a converted paper mill factory. The 55-year-old had her scalp ripped from her skull in the shocking accident.

Despite severe 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 tragic day unfolded.

“I was wearing my factory cap, protective eyewear and hearing protection,” Pia, from Narrawallee, Australia, told creatorzine.com. “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. I opened the door and said my colleague Rachel’s name, after which my memory stops.”

Back in February 2019, the scientist was working on creating seaweed-based gels aimed at repairing damaged tissue and enhancing wound healing. The incident occurred in a pilot factory she had established within an unused 1950s paper mill in New South Wales.

Rachel described Pia as eerily composed despite being soaked in blood. Pia recounted: “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. 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 striving to stabilise her blood pressure before she could be airlifted to Sydney’s St George Hospital.

Doctors tried to reattach her scalp during six hours of emergency surgery, but the blood vessels had been too severely 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. However, in an extraordinary turn of events, the scientist believes her own seaweed-based research played a crucial role in 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.”

During the following year, she endured six additional reconstructive operations as medics gradually stretched remaining scalp tissue over 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.

“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 centres on SXRG84, a seaweed-derived gel that seems to replicate 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.” Researchers at PhycoHealth, the firm Pia established, are exploring whether the marine gel might assist burns patients, persistent wounds and tissue damaged by chemotherapy.

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.”

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