He took the medical world by storm when he built and transplanted the worlds first bioartificial windpipe two years earlier. Death Season 2, Mandy Moore Joins Dr. The popular press also has a lot to answer for. My wife was the one who said, If you truly believe that people are dying from this and that you could maybe make a difference, you cant just fold up and go home, he said. "Maybe it happened because I am a journalist, and once I sort of woke up and put my journalist hat back on, I could expose him," she said. Or rather, his celebrity status helped him do so. She considered backing out. Faced with this public relations disaster, the Karolinska Institute immediately promised to investigate the allegations but then, within days, suddenly announced that Macchiarinis contract would not be extended. Plus: NYC sixth-grader struck and killed by stray bullet; New Hampshire police search for person of interest in double homicide; Fyre Festival fraudster released early from prison; and manhunt continues for escaped Texas prisoner. The case is pending. She received a new trachea in January and is believed to be the first patient in the world to undergo a successful direct transplant of a donor trachea. Ground-breaking work on synthetic organ transplants made Paolo Macchiarini one of the most famous doctors in the world. Likewise the whole idea of a wedding: Macchiarini was still married to his wife of 30 years. Gretchen Vogel is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine based in Berlin, Germany. ONE Championship We will send you a maximum of two emails in, We will be in touch to remind you to contribute. The court had to apply the intentional indifference standard for the assault charges, he says, which is difficult to prove. Prosecutors asked for a five-year prison sentence for Macchiarinis liability in Cetirs bodily injury, but a Swedish court instead gave him a suspended sentence this June, deciding that he hadnt intended to cause the patients harm, according to BBC News. Anyone can read what you share. She received another Philippines Talking about her spouse Paolo, he became infamous for research fraud and manipulative behavior. Coming from different countries including Eritrea, Spain, Russian, Iceland, Britain and the United States, 20 patients were operated on by Macchiarini, who provide them with an artificial windpipe. Miss Universe 2021 Benita decided to get in touch with private investigator Frank Murphy. Plus: A Chicago mother is arrested in connection to the murder of her 6-year-old son; the convicted killer Robert Durst dies at age 78; Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes sentencing date is set; and an LGBTQ+ rights movement hero is found dead in a Florida landfill. Besides which, compassionate concerns dont override the basic principles of patient safety and informed consent. At the time, Macchiarini was employed by the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He traveled to Illinois to operate on a Korean toddler who was born without a trachea and who was going to be the youngest person to ever receive an artificial one. "I have to tell people. They exchange their vows in Italy. She spent more than three years in intensive care and endured 200 surgical procedures, theTimes reports. The plastic trachea that Yesim Cetir received disfigured her and made her last three years in life basically like torture, said Bosse Lindquist, a documentarian who broke the story in Sweden about Dr. Macchiarini in a television series, The Experiment.. In this episode, eyewitnesses, officials, and some of Paolos victims thus reveal how they got conned by him, with his former lover television producer Benita Alexander at the front and center. Paolo Macchiarini is exposed Reality struck Alexander's fantasy romance eight weeks before she was supposed to marry Macchiarini in 2015, when she received an email from a colleague with the subject line saying, "The Pope." Selena died in a hospital due to a loss of blood and cardiac arrest, two weeks before her 24th birthday. In early 2014, four Karolinska doctors defied the reigning culture of silence by complaining about Macchiarini. New Jersey COVID-19 There is South Koreas Hwang Woo-suk who, in 2004, falsely claimed to have created the first human embryonic stem cells by means of cloning. Which left a big, burning question in the air: if Macchiarini was a pathological liar in matters of love, what about his medical research? Macchiarini is known for his research fraud and manipulative behavior. He did this by chemically stripping away the cells of a windpipe taken from a deceased donor; he then seeded the bare scaffold with stem cells taken from Castillos own bone marrow. Dr. Genden said Dr. Macchiarinis rise and fall profoundly affected his own path. Benita was loyal to and supported Paolo when his professional life took a dark turn. Although all three patients eventually died, Dr. Macchiarini was not directly accused of killing them. I had a brave face, but I was scared, Ms. Sein said. Paolo Macchiarini is a thoracic surgeon. This guy mutilated people., Between 2011 and 2014, Macchiarini implanted artificial windpipes in at least eight patients in Sweden, the United States, and Russia. In 2013, the hospital halted future operations with synthetic trachea and opted to not extend Macchiarinis contract. Abu Dhabi And investigations by both institute and the hospital found coverups regarding Macchiarinis work. Vanity Fair also later discovered that several of Paolo's other statements were false, including his claims about having been an associate professor at the University of Pisa. Jakarta His recovery put Macchiarini on the front page of the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/health/trachea-transplant-genden.html. After several weeks in recovery, she is home. Dr. Macchiarini received a conditional, or suspended, sentence, and was acquitted of assault charges related to two other patients who had also received the artificial organs from him at the Swedish facility. Now his reputation lies in tatters. It relieved a little bit of burden from him.. Few people at Karolinska, especially among those in power, knew enough about it to appreciate Delaeres claims. At first, they just connected as friends. If she talked for over five minutes, she had to stop because I couldnt breathe.. Las Vegas All three patients later died. Therefore, on June 12, 2008, at Hospital Clinic Barcelona, she received a cadaver trachea graft implanted as a bronchus transplant. After Macchiarini fitted Cetir with one of his artificial windpipes in 2012, her condition worsened. This was Macchiarinis first big success. KI officials let him do this. Nearly all of those patients have died. February 28, 2022 Emanuela Pecchia is famously known as the wife of popular Swiss-born Italian thoracic surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini. Benita first met Paolo at the bar at Bostons Mandarin Oriental hotel in February 2013, when she was helping coordinate an interview for an NBC special on regenerative medicine. Macchiarini shot to prominence back in 2008, when he created a new airway for Claudia Castillo, a young woman from Barcelona. Today, Ms. Sein, 56, dances and plays tag with her grandchildren and plans to resume working, possibly as an acupuncturist. Paolo Macchiarini traveled to Illinois to operate on toddler Hannah Warren, who was born without a trachea in 2013. In his case, his stem cells were seeded into the airway just hours before it was implanted into him, making it work perfectly fine. Other trachea replacement attempts include transplanting part of a donors frozen, preserved aorta, the bodys main artery, and fabricating tracheas from patients own chest muscles and rib cartilage. To some extent, they believed Macchiarini because he told them what they wanted to hear. Surely, he got away with so much because he was considered an exception to the rules with more than a whiff of the Nobel about him. Records show that even with his implant failing, Andemariam was able to complete his Ph.D. before his demise in January 2013. Journals retracted several of his studies. No one wanted to collaborate with me. I thought, If they do a transplant for everything, they should do a transplant for trachea, she recalled. Ive never in my experience witnessed a fraud like this, with this level of international flair, Murphy told Vanity Fair. She visits Mount Sinai weekly for blood work. In 2010, the Italian surgeon was recruited by KIhome of the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But after Alexander learned that Pope Francis was scheduled to visit South America at the time of their wedding, she confronted Macchiarini about his claims. They will especially examine the judges decision that Macchiarini couldnt be held responsible for what happened to Andemariam and Lyles because he acted in distress, according to the courts statement. According to hospital staff, she had roughly 40 near-death experiences during this time, the judgment said. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. When Macchiarini accused one of them, Karl-Henrik Grinnemo, of stealing his work in a grant application, Hamsten found him guilty. Paolo was in the house, but he was not alone after Benita's friends were asked to leave, they noticed a blonde woman coming out of the house, with two young children. Gerdin determined that Macchiarini committed scientific misconduct, but leadership at the Karolinska Institute ignored the findings and cleared Macchiarini. Instead, they found him guilty of negligence and the lesser charge of causing bodily harm. ONE Super Series In the same year, he earned his medical degree from the, In 1989, he took a course on statistics in clinical research at, In 1994, he obtained a masters degree certificate in organ and tissue transplantation from the, From 2006 to 2009, he was an investigator at the, In June 2008, he performed a trachea transplant on, He performed a synthetic trachea transplant on, In 2012, he was charged in Italy with attempted aggravated fraud. Paolo, a visiting researcher at the prestigious Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, had shot to fame as the only doctor in the world who was able to use biological and synthetic scaffolds bathed in the patients' own stem cells for trachea transplants. According to The New York Times, Macchiarini is an Italian surgeon who was found criminally liable this June for causing felony bodily injury to a Turkish woman named Yesim Cetir, a patient who had received one of his 3D-printed windpipes and later died. The Karolinska Institute declined to comment for this article, noting only that Dr. Macchiarinis sentence may be appealed. Macchiarini told people that Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Vladimir Putin would attend the wedding, Andrea Bocelli would perform, and Pope Francis (a patient of his, or so he said) would officiate the ceremony, per Vanity Fair. Sadly, she passed away soon after her second implant. Largely confined to her Bronx apartment, she needed home health aides and had to quit her career as a social worker for pregnant women. He is from Italy. Seven of the eight patients Paolo inserted tracheas into have died. Paolo Macchiarini was amazingly accomplished, stunningly successful, and fabulously rich. Experts say this case is about what the definition of a resident is under Spanish law. Why dont the Electoral College and popular vote always match up? An unhappy result of this is the rise of pseudo-scientific therapies. All rights reserved. He said yeah, so I said Lets go for it., After extracting the donors organs, you go next door and you open up Sonia and you remove the diseased trachea, and there is no going back, Dr. Genden said. Brazil He is still licensed to practice medicine in Europe. Alexander said that Macchiarini told her he was still married to his wife because they were Catholic but were separated. He officially cleared Macchiarini of scientific misconduct, allowing merely that hed sometimes acted without due care. Acquittal is therefore difficult to defend., But Gerdin says the verdict is not unexpected. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. Paolo Macchiarini, in a 2013 photo, implanted synthetic windpipes into multiple patients; all but one died following complications with the implants. The answer came only a couple of weeks later, when Swedish television began broadcasting a three-part expos of Macchiarini and his work. KI commissioned surgeon Bengt Gerdin, a professor emeritus at Uppsala University, to investigate the issue. One of these is the hype surrounding stem cells. In the case of Cetir, he should have known the risk of complications was higher than the expected benefit, the judges ruled. In such dire circumstances, new treatments can be tried as a last resort. One was a 2-year-old girl named Hannah Warren, on whom hed operated in Peoria, IL, in 2013, according to Vanity Fair. Benita said that, if she can take any lessons away from what happened to her, she hopes that her experience will help others. The apparent success of Ms. Seins operation is also notable because the trachea field has been rocked for years by a sensational scandal. Benita told CrimeFeed that Paolo always paid for everything and was "extremely generous." He reportedly lied on his CV and research papers to trick patients, causing almost all those who received his inventive trachea transplants (using their own bone marrow cells for organ functionality) to lose their lives. Paolo then came across Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, a man from Eritrea who was training to be a doctor when he got diagnosed with cancer. ABCs true-crime documentary series The Con premieres with the story of Paolo Macchiarini, who was once considered a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine but allegedly turned out to be just a fraud. At the time, Macchiarini was working at Swedens Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine every year. Read More: Where is Benita Alexander Now? Therefore, of all the medically ill individuals Paolo has ever provided a biological or synthetic implant to, at least 8 of them allegedly died due to his misconduct in research, failure to provide proper post-operative care, and/or his disregard for ethical practices. Her global quest to find out the truth about the man who left her personal and professional life in shambles is documented in He Lied About Everything on Investigation Discovery. In September 2020, Swedish prosecutors announced charges against him for aggravated assault in connection to three surgeries that he had performed at the. She told CrimeFeed that, looking back, it seemed odd to her she had not met many of Paolo's close friends in Barcelona. Prior to this, he was regarded as a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine using both biological and synthetic scaffolds seeded with patients own stem cells as trachea transplants. In 2017, prosecutors in Sweden charged Macchiarini with manslaughter in connection with the three patients who had received transplants at KI in 2011 and 2012, all of whom had died: Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, a graduate student from Eritrea with a slow-growing cancer obstructing his windpipe; Christopher Lyles, a 30-year-old American with tracheal cancer; and Yesim Cetir, a teenager from Turkey whose trachea had been accidentally damaged during a previous surgery. It did much the same for Macchiarinis windpipe replacements. In 2016, Vanity Fair published an expose on Paolo that uncovered even more damning evidence. Why are people hesitant to trust a COVID-19 vaccine? They shared a happy relationship. KI fired Macchiarini in March 2016, 2 months after the Swedish documentary came out. Unfortunately, the scandal is much bigger than Karolinska, which accounts for only three of the patients who have received Macchiarinis regenerating windpipes. Dr. Paolo Macchiarini became a star by creating a bioartificial windpipe. Please try again later. A High-Flying Italian Surgeons Fall From Grace, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/world/europe/macchiarini-windpipe-surgeon-deaths.html. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Previously considered a pioneer for using both biological and synthetic scaffolds She says she feels she has been given a chance of being alive one more time.. It would be a star-studded event. Benita Alexander with one of the custom-made gowns intended for her wedding [Investigation Discovery]. The Italian surgeon and his Italian wife Emanuela Pecchia have one son and one daughter. (LogOut/ In 2015, the Karolinska Institute hired an independent investigator named Dr. Bengt Gerdin to look into the Macchiarini situation, per the Times. With his methods still under fire in the West, he continues to work in Russia. Four of Macchiarinis colleagues at KI, including Corbascio, filed official complaints in 2014 charging that several papers describing the surgeries deliberately left out serious complications in the patients. At any rate, some of his most powerful friends were themselves Nobel judges until, with his fall from grace, they fell too. Any replacement trachea must be rigid or itll collapse like a straw in a McDonalds milkshake, Dr. Genden said. They didnt. For the respect of privacy, his wifes identity is not revealed on the internet. Macchiarini was also charged with but acquitted of assault charges related to the deaths of two more of his artificial windpipe patients, an Eritrean man named Andemariam Beyene and an American man named Christopher Lyles, according to BBC News. They also questioned whether Macchiarini had obtained proper ethical permission for the surgeries and challenged a paper describing animal experiments with the technique. Its very exciting, said Dr. G. Alexander Patterson, a professor of surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the case. Only three are still alive as of September 2020. I cant do this anymore, Sonia Sein told herself, her family and her doctor. Also, in such a highly competitive environment, people are keen to show allegiance to their superiors and wary of criticising them. The first was a Vanity Fair article about his affair with Benita Alexander, an award-winning producer for NBC News. But in October 2017, the attorney general's office announced that a crime could not be proven, because the patients might have died anyway. Emanuela Pecchia is married to Paolo Macchiarini for over 30 years. Only four months after Macchiarini operated on Claudia Castillo, his results provisional but very positive were published online by the Lancet. Macchiarini, they claimed, wasnt really doing clinical research. You start to panic because you cant breathe., By early 2020, ethical approvals were in place, but the coronavirus pandemic held things up. But when Dr. Sander S. Florman, director of Mount Sinais Transplantation Institute, and LiveOnNY, a nonprofit organ donation organization, agreed to collaborate, his wife, Audrey, encouraged him. Meanwhile, Macchiarinis career soared. The official report into the matter dubbed this the bandwagon effect. Macchiarini has consistently claimed he is innocent. Macchiarini, meanwhile, said he did not accept the findings of the disciplinary board. Los Angeles While there isnt enough data to actually prove this, we do have some key indicators. He additionally claimed that former patients also included Bill and Hillary Clinton, and thenPresident Obama. By 2011, he was working in Sweden at one of the worlds most prestigious medical universities, the Karolinska Institute, whose professors annually select the winner of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Prosecutors dropped the case a few months later, however, saying they didnt have sufficient evidence to prove manslaughter. He was handsome, suave, and a charmer. Ohio The other side is flat and mobile to move air to the lungs. As the home of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine, one of its ambitions is to create scientific celebrities. A review of public records in Italy found that Paolo was never divorced from Emanuela Pecchia, his wife of nearly 30 years. (The big exception is blood stem cell transplantation, which has been saving the lives of people with leukemia and other cancers of the blood for decades.). If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. WebIn reality, Paolo had not worked with the Pope, and he was still married to his wife of 30 years. When the blood vessels were finally connected, the donor trachea began bleeding. Every patient had another, nonlethal option, Pierre Delaere, a trachea expert at KU Leuven and an early critic of Macchiarini, said in an email to Science. Thats what Macchiarini told his fiancee. Brave CF The first season of both the Peacock series and the Wondery podcast of the same name told the story of Christopher Duntsch, a former neurosurgeon now serving a life sentence for botched surgeries that left more than 30 patients maimed or dead. A surgeon who just a decade ago was celebrated around the globe as a pioneer in stem cell transplants has been convicted of one count of causing bodily harm, a felony, in a Swedish court. However, Swedish TV reporters also decided to take a close look at Macchiarinis work. So I called and called till I got an appointment., Dr. Genden said Ms. Sein beseeched him for the transplant, saying, You need to do this for me or Im going to end my life.. In January 2016, Macchiarini received an extraordinary double dose of bad press. And Murphy found that Macchiarinis claims about the wedding were almost all untrue and that the surgeon was married and had been for nearly 30 years.
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