Jack Burke will be remembered for successfully developing the first commercially reproducible, synthetic human skin. He was born on 22 July 1922 in Chicago, where he grew up. He started studying engineering at the University of Illinois, but left after Pearl Harbor and joined the Army. At the end of the Second World War he initially decided to become a psychiatrist, but, having graduated from Harvard in 1951, he trained to become a surgeon. He eventually became professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and surgeon to Massachusetts General Hospital. He was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1999. His election was in recognition of his contributions to surgery and his close connections with the UK. When he had completed his training in the USA (1960), he was awarded a fellowship to work with Sir Ashley Miles, director of the Lister Institute in London. He was already interested in surgical infection and during this year at the Lister Institute he performed a number of seminal experiments which demonstrated for the first time that if antibiotics were to be used to prevent infection after surgery then they needed to be given approximately one hour before surgery ('The effective period of preventive antibiotic action in experimental incisions and dermal lesion' *Surgery*. 1961 Jul;50:161-8). This paper took a little while to be recognised, but it completely altered the way in which prophylactic antibiotics were administered in surgery. Now throughout the world prophylactic antibiotics (or as Burke preferred to call them 'preventive antibiotics') are given before surgery or during the induction of the anaesthesia in all patients at risk of infectious contamination during surgery or those undergoing high risk surgeries. For example, in patients undergoing colectomy the incidence of wound infections was reduced by well over 50%. He was also interested in the study of metabolic changes after trauma and in particular after severe burn injuries. In 1965 the Shriners built a children's hospital for burn injuries at the Massachusetts General and Jack Burke was appointed as its first director and chief of surgery. He pioneered the introduction of silver nitrate dressing in the treatment of burns in children and studied the metabolic changes in burns. He pioneered the adoption of early excision of the deeper burn wounds and their coverage with skin grafts. However, in major burn injury there was insufficient skin that could be harvested from the burnt child to cover the excised areas and this led him to look for an artificial substitute. He worked with Ionnis V Yannas from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was professor of fibers and polymers, and together they developed an artificial skin consisting of a silicone sheet, below which is a layer of collagen, used as a scaffold for the patient's own cells. It took some nine years to develop 'Integra', which is now used routinely throughout the world in the management of severe burn wound, and is one of the first examples of tissue engineering. Jack was a visiting fellow at Balliol College for a year in 1990 to 1991. He contributed significantly to the activities of the Nuffield department of surgery and led memorable grand rounds on the topic of burn management and treatment of mass casualties. He devoted his year primarily to writing and thinking; he was indeed a lateral thinker, an unusual trait for a surgeon. He died of pancreatic cancer on 3 November 2011 at the age of 89. He was survived by his wife Aggie, two sons, John and Peter, and a daughter Annie, all of whom are successful academics. Another son, Andrew, died of lymphoma at the age of 13.