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. Benita Alexander had no way of knowing that, by the end of her love story, her heart would be broken and many of Paolos patients who received the miracle transplants would be dead. I could feel it in my lungs.. 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Heres this handsome Italian surgeon at the finest institution in the world, the Karolinska, and hes everything Im not: Hes got a beautiful head of hair, he drives a motorcycle, hes got an accent, hes incredibly charismatic and dynamic, Dr. Genden said. I wasnt lying exactly, just Reports of their success always seemed like hot air to him. She spent more than three years in intensive care and endured 200 surgical procedures, theTimes reports. Remembering George Floyd: A year of protest. All rights reserved. The surgeons defense attorney, Bjrn Hurtig, said his client was considering an appeal. That was a very smart idea to help maintain the fragile blood supply of the airway by leaving the esophagus in place behind it, Dr. Patterson said. How a star surgeon's personal and professional lives converged 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. They should be. The first person to receive one of these was Andemariam Beyene, an Eritrean doctoral student in geology at the University of Iceland. Benita told CrimeFeed that Paolo always paid for everything and was "extremely generous." The next morning, with the donor and Ms. Sein in adjacent rooms, a team of over 50 medical personnel assembled. On Jan. 12, Dr. Genden got a call: An appropriate donor had died. They exchange their vows in Italy. Stem-cell scientist Dr. Paolo Macchiarini was accused of wrongdoing during operations on three people between 2011 and 2014. Colleagues accused him of manipulating his results, even warning of the harm caused by these so-called regenerative windpipes. Paolo Macchiarini Wife The Karolinska Institute, alleging scientific misconduct, dismissed Dr. Macchiarini, who has long denied wrongdoing. Back in New York, Benita found herself unable to stop thinking about Paolo's patients. Also seduced by Macchiarini was former NBC News producer Benita Alexander, who met the surgeon in 2013 when she was working on A Leap of Faith, an NBC special about Macchiarini hosted by Meredith Vieira. North Carolina Anyone can read what you share. She had subsequently undergone six major surgeries and more than 10 smaller procedures, but with all conventional approaches to address her condition exhausted, she made plans to have the tube removed and receive only palliative care. The Italian surgeon and his Italian wife Emanuela Pecchia have one son and one daughter. Florida Most protagonists on medical dramas are modern-day heroes. An advantage is that immunosuppressants are necessary only for several months, he said. Euan Ward reported from London, and Christina Anderson from Bastad, Sweden. This argument didnt wash with those who later investigated the case. Benita packed her bags again, and began to search for Paolo in order to face him once more and their final confrontation is captured in He Lied About Everything. Any replacement trachea must be rigid or itll collapse like a straw in a McDonalds milkshake, Dr. Genden said. The plastic trachea that Yesim Cetir received disfigured her and made her last three years in life basically like torture, Bosse Lindquist, the documentarian behind the Swedish TV series The Experiment, told the Times. None other than Pope Francis would officiate, and his papal palace in Castel Gandolfo would serve as the venue. Scientific pioneer, superstar surgeon, miracle worker thats how Paolo Macchiarini was known for several years. Los Angeles Instead, they found him guilty of negligence and the lesser charge of causing bodily harm. 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. You can see this in the speed with which his breakthroughs were accepted. They identified many problems with the way the twin organisations handled him. Thats something that was new to us, so we need to analyze that, Lundstrm-Kron says. Ground-breaking work on synthetic organ transplants made Paolo Macchiarini one of the most famous doctors in the world. Likewise, they didnt undertake a proper risk assessment of the procedure, nor did Macchiarinis team seek government permits for the plastic windpipes, stem cells, and chemical growth factors they used. Few people at Karolinska, especially among those in power, knew enough about it to appreciate Delaeres claims. On May 13, Alexander left her job. 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. Its kind of a marginal substitute, and many patients need further interventions to maintain their airways.. She received another One of these is the hype surrounding stem cells. The donor was a young man (identifying details are being withheld to protect privacy). This was Macchiarinis first big success. Bangkok Next month, she will turn 57. But the judges decided that, because the initial prognoses for Andemariam and Lyles were so grim without surgery, Macchiarini could not be held criminally responsible in those cases. The operation, performed at one of the worlds most prestigious medical universities, part of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was hailed as revolutionary. Besides which, compassionate concerns dont override the basic principles of patient safety and informed consent. In Macchiarinis case, the hope was that patients could be treated with stem cells taken from their own bone marrow. A review of public records in Italy found that Paolo was never divorced from Emanuela Pecchia, his wife of nearly 30 years. Every year, it gives science a show-business makeover, picking out from the mass of medical researchers those individuals deserving of superstardom. Delaere was one of the earliest and harshest critics of Macchiarinis engineered airways. 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. But some of Alexander's friends began to become suspicious. Also, in such a highly competitive environment, people are keen to show allegiance to their superiors and wary of criticising them. And difficult to jump off. I had a brave face, but I was scared, Ms. Sein said. Most, including Andemariam Beyene, are now dead. Paolo dropped another bomb when he told Benita that, despite the fact that both of them had been divorced, Pope Francis would officiate at their wedding. One biomedical researcher has documented a total of 20 tracheal regeneration procedures by Macchiarini in Russia, Spain, Britain, and the United States, as well as Sweden. 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. Her transformation follows a groundbreaking experimental procedure she underwent in January: the first time, medical experts believe, a donor trachea has been successfully directly transplanted into another person. Surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was hailed for turning the dream of regenerative medicine into a reality until he was exposed as a con artist and false prophet. Border crisis: Whats happening at the US-Mexico border? 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. As it was built from Claudias own cells, she didnt need to be on any risky immunosuppressant drugs. Today, Ms. Sein, 56, dances and plays tag with her grandchildren and plans to resume working, possibly as an acupuncturist. Brazilian MMA fighters According to the magazine, in 2012 he was charged in Italy with attempted aggravated fraud related to alleged efforts to persuade very ill patients to undergo radical surgery at facilities where he had privileges. 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. The theory was simple: let the body do most of the work. Kentucky He additionally claimed that former patients also included Bill and Hillary Clinton, and thenPresident Obama. This is how NBCs Meredith Vieira put it in her documentary about Macchiarini, appropriately called A Leap of Faith: Just imagine a world where any injured or diseased organ or body part you have is simply replaced by a new artificial one, literally manmade in the lab, just for you. This marvelous world was now within reach, thanks to Macchiarini. A Swedish filmmakers investigative documentary raised further questions, as did a Vanity Fair article detailing how the beguiling surgeon became romantically involved with an NBC producer working on a feature about him and apparently conned her into believing he was divorced and would marry her in a ceremony officiated by the pope and attended by the Clintons, Obamas, John Legend and Elton John. Death for Season 2 at Peacock, From 'Truth About Pam' to 'Candy,' True-Crime EPs Tell the Truth (VIDEO). Paolo Macchiarini at a press conference in 2008. Was he conning his patients, his colleagues and the scientific community? Tokyo Paolo grew close to Alexander's daughter [Investigation Discovery], He was incredibly charming, worldly smart, sophisticated, and seemed very gentle," Benita told CrimeFeed. The court ruling Thursday was in a case involving a Turkish woman named Yesim Cetir, who was the longest surviving of his patients at Karolinska. She told CrimeFeed that, looking back, it seemed odd to her she had not met many of Paolo's close friends in Barcelona. The popular press also has a lot to answer for. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. The law is supposed to protect individuals from all types of assault, especially when they are powerless, said Dr. Bengt Gerdin, an independent investigator who was hired by the Karolinska Institute in 2015 to look into Dr. Macchiarinis work. KI commissioned surgeon Bengt Gerdin, a professor emeritus at Uppsala University, to investigate the issue. And because it was built from Castillos own cells, she didnt need to be on any risky immunosuppressant drugs. But on Thursday, the surgeon, Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, was found criminally liable by a Swedish court for causing felony bodily injury to a patient he had fitted with one of the windpipes at a medical university in Sweden. Discovery, Inc. or its subsidiaries and affiliates. However, Swedish TV reporters also decided to take a close look at Macchiarinis work. They also questioned whether Macchiarini had obtained proper ethical permission for the surgeries and challenged a paper describing animal experiments with the technique. New York City We now know that wasnt true. 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. At night, when she connected her tracheal tube to a ventilator, the alarm kept going off to let people know that I stopped breathing, said Ms. Sein, who hated causing her family concern. I can breathe, she was amazed to discover. At the time, Macchiarini was working at Swedens Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine every year. However, he eventually found out about his previous associations. There was another reason to be daunted too: historical assumptions that tracheas werent transplantable. Therefore, on June 12, 2008, at Hospital Clinic Barcelona, she received a cadaver trachea graft implanted as a bronchus transplant. The procedure involved replacing a damaged trachea with a plastic replica that had been soaked in the patients stem cells. The felony conviction means Macchiarini would have a hard time finding employment again in Sweden, Gerdin says. The scandal meant theres an amazing amount of scrutiny, he said. 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Paolo Macchiarini As of late March, 6.5 percent of cells in the donor trachea were hers, with the proportion increasing, he said. The story portrayed Macchiarini, who was already married at the time, as a serial fabulist who exaggerated or lied about degrees, academic appointments, and personal accomplishments. The apparent success of Ms. Seins operation is also notable because the trachea field has been rocked for years by a sensational scandal. Stem cell research is a hot field of science and, according to statistics, also a rather scandal-prone one. Because immunosuppressant drugs are required to prevent rejection of the transplant, cancer patients would be eligible only if free of cancer for five years, Dr. Genden said. Castillo was soon back home, chasing after her kids. I cant do this anymore, Sonia Sein told herself, her family and her doctor. Andemariam Beyene met up with Macchiarini in Iceland a year after his operation but later died Two more patients were also given transplants at the Karolinska Stem cell clinics have sprung up like weeds, offering to treat just about any ailment you can name. No one is more powerless than a patient with a disease, said Dr. Gerdin. By June 2013, when Paolo took Benita to Venice, Italy, for a romantic weekend, she knew she was falling madly in love. As per Its enough to worry officials from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Sadly, she passed away soon after her second implant. 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. He was born in Basel, Switzerland to Italian parents. To some extent, they believed Macchiarini because he told them what they wanted to hear. For six years, she had endured a tube inserted in her windpipe, or trachea, to keep her alive, but her discomfort and distress were becoming more and more unbearable. Its very significant, said Dr. Pierre Delaere, a professor of head and neck surgery at University Hospital Gasthuisberg in Belgium, a trachea specialist not involved in the case. Team Lakay Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. KI fired Macchiarini in March 2016, 2 months after the Swedish documentary came out. Not just that, Paolo was also entangled in several other controversies. Around the same time, an article in Vanity Fair described how Macchiarini had misled a girlfriendan NBC news producer working on a flattering documentary about his surgeriesinto thinking they would be married in a ceremony attended by the Clintons and Obamas and officiated by the pope. In 2017, Paolo worked at a university in Russia, where he was given a federal grant for oesophagus research on primates, and operated on baboons rather than humans. Benita was also growing concerned about the cost of the wedding. None of these institutions have faced the same kind of public scrutiny. WebPaolo Macchiarini Net Worth. The media began calling him "Dr. Frankenstein" and said that he committed "the world's biggest medical fraud.". 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. Please try again later. Donald Trump Yet because of the ensuing complications, she had to receive a tracheoplasty in April 2011 and another cadaveric trachea graft in 2018. 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. She was wearing a blonde wig, and her nervous laughter is audible on the video they shot. It won Dr. Macchiarini international news coverage and cemented his place as a celebrity scientist. As of the time of that judgment, Macchiarini had not been prosecuted in other countries where he implanted his artificial windpipes, and it was unclear whether he was still practicing medicine, the Times adds. Likewise the secretary-general of the Nobel Committee. With his methods still under fire in the West, he continues to work in Russia. However, behind closed doors, Dr. Macchiarini was hiding a secret the procedures were not working. The verdict is the latest development in Macchiarinis stunning fall from grace. By using a patients own cells, Dr. Macchiarini sought to rectify an age-old problem with transplants involving donated organs, which the body sometimes rejects as foreign tissue. Talking about her spouse Paolo, he became infamous for research fraud and manipulative behavior. Yet, for the vast majority of such treatments, there is little solid evidence that they work. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Emanuela Pecchia Everything We Know On Paolo Macchiarini Macchiarini was fired in 2016 amid allegations of fraud and scientific misconduct after many of his transplant recipients died. Dr. Delaere developed another innovative method, performed on nine patients so far: implanting a section of donor trachea in a patients forearm for weeks until it develops blood vessels and can replace part of the patients trachea. He could see no real evidence that the windpipe scaffolds were becoming living, functioning airways in which case, they were destined to fail. Or rather, his celebrity status helped him do so. It sounded unbelievable, but Paolo explained to her that he had treated Pope John Paul II in the past, and had become part of a highly classified group of doctors that treated the global elite. But it was already too late. Benita was loyal to and supported Paolo when his professional life took a dark turn. These included Harriet Wallberg, who was the vice-chancellor of the Karolinska Institute in 2010, when Macchiarini was recruited. It is thus likely she has since passed away. However, its imperative to mention that the doctor has only been criminally found guilty of causing bodily harm to a single patient he operated on in Sweden back in 2011 two other charges of assault were dismissed.

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