A 19-year-old Iowa college student allegedly defrauded over 400 donors after raising more than $37,000 by faking a triple cancer diagnosis. Allegations also emerged that the risky procedure was performed on at least one person who was not critically ill at the time. Dr. Paolo Macchiarini at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 2013. He opened and cleaned out the donors esophagus, laying it against Ms. Seins esophagus. 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. He says prosecutors should have pressed for manslaughter charges because Macchiarini had no evidence that the tracheas he implanted would develop into normally functioning organs. His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. Death Season 2, Mandy Moore Joins Dr. I didnt want Paolo to not be the man I believed him to be, she told Vanity Fair. In the months and years following their respective surgeries, all of them except Dmitri Onogda have passed away due to post-operative complications. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. 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. 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. Even so, it wasnt until 2016 that the Karolinska Institute declined to renew his contract. This set a dangerous example. If as a doctor you do stupid things, then you can be charged. But the not-guilty verdicts on the other two cases highlight how the law can leave vulnerable people unprotected, he says, for example when they are facing life-and-death decisions and holding less information than their doctor. Selena died in a hospital due to a loss of blood and cardiac arrest, two weeks before her 24th birthday. Benita decided to get in touch with private investigator Frank Murphy. Other witnesses contradicted that, arguing that with Andemariams slow-growing cancer, minor surgeries and other treatments could have kept him alive. 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 None of these institutions have faced the same kind of public scrutiny. Discovery, Inc. or its subsidiaries and affiliates. A genius is a revolutionary by definition, a risk-taker and a law-breaker. She considered backing out. You can see this in the speed with which his breakthroughs were accepted. And fooled almost everyone. Not only that, they later covered it up.. No one is more powerless than a patient with a disease, said Dr. Gerdin. 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. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. In April 2017, the university terminated his project. Ciaran Lynch, born in 2000 in Ireland without a functional trachea, received a transplant on March 15, 2010, at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. But even if his days had been numbered, this didnt necessarily justify what Macchiarini put him through. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Stem cell clinics have sprung up like weeds, offering to treat just about any ailment you can name. At first, they just connected as friends. 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. The next morning, with the donor and Ms. Sein in adjacent rooms, a team of over 50 medical personnel assembled. Dressed in a white lab coat or in surgical scrubs, with his broad, handsome face and easy charm, he certainly looked the part. One of these is the hype surrounding stem cells. Unfortunately, the scandal is much bigger than Karolinska, which accounts for only three of the patients who have received Macchiarinis regenerating windpipes. Why are people hesitant to trust a COVID-19 vaccine? The Karolinska Institute declined to comment for this article, noting only that Dr. Macchiarinis sentence may be appealed. Any replacement trachea must be rigid or itll collapse like a straw in a McDonalds milkshake, Dr. Genden said. In 2016, Vanity Fair published an expose on Paolo that uncovered even more damning evidence. Recently, Ms. Sein, covering the hole with her hand to speak, enthused about having the energy to cook sesame chicken for the first time and how she aims to visit relatives in Puerto Rico. Benita was also growing increasingly concerned, because she had not yet been introduced to Paolo's children or even seen where she was meant to live with him in Barcelona. But that day is always postponed. By the time the program aired, in mid-2014, the couple were planning their marriage. However, behind closed doors, Dr. Macchiarini was hiding a secret the procedures were not working. Colleagues accused him of manipulating his results, even warning of the harm caused by these so-called regenerative windpipes. She had already spent $10,000 on engraved invitations made for a guest list that included the Obamas, the Clintons, Vladimir Putin, and Elton John. As per The couple set a date: July 11, 2015. A White House source confirmed that Bill Clinton had never met Paolo. The verdict is the latest development in Macchiarinis stunning fall from grace. Even the jewelry he had given her was The donor was a young man (identifying details are being withheld to protect privacy). She says she feels she has been given a chance of being alive one more time.. 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. Because mucus would clog her tube, she was constantly suctioning, constantly worried about her airway, and it becomes overwhelming, Dr. Genden said, like being held down in a swimming pool. Guided by a high-powered microscope, he used surgical thread half the diameter of a human hair. George Floyd Brave CF They and their loved ones fall victim to false hope. Chatri Sityodtong 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. Thats something that was new to us, so we need to analyze that, Lundstrm-Kron says. Likewise the secretary-general of the Nobel Committee. With Macchiarinis exploits endorsed by management and breathlessly reported in the media, it was all too easy to jump on that bandwagon. China Benita Alexander thought that she was living a real-life fairy tale when she met her fianc, Paolo Macchiarini. 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. It relieved a little bit of burden from him.. Were going to show up and say, As a student, I had this idea on the back of a napkin and now were ready to go and if it fails, the patient dies and it becomes yet another example of some surgeon who thought he could solve a problem and hes created, instead, just the opposite.. Today, Ms. Sein, 56, dances and plays tag with her grandchildren and plans to resume working, possibly as an acupuncturist. As it was built from Claudias own cells, she didnt need to be on any risky immunosuppressant drugs. So did Karolinskas dean of research. Last year, however, the dream soured, exposing an ugly reality. California Anyone can read what you share. From that moment on, she made a proposal to Paolo Macchiarini, and Dateline planned to publish the story. They identified many problems with the way the twin organisations handled him. 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.. The theory was simple: let the body do most of the work. Award-winning documentary-maker Benita Alexander was swept off her feet by renowned Italian doctor Paolo Macchiarini in 2013 while she was working on a story about his pioneering medical work. In January 2016, Macchiarini received an extraordinary double dose of bad press. Her ex-husband John was dying of cancer. Talking about her spouse Instead, they found him guilty of negligence and the lesser charge of causing bodily harm. Her colleague had sent an article that said the pope would not be in Rome, or even Italy, on the day of their wedding. "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. 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. Watch He Lied About Everything on ID GO now! The Vatican confirmed that he had never been the Pope's doctor. In 2011, Dr. Macchiarini, a renowned leader in the field of regenerative medicine, took the medical world by storm when he built and implanted the worlds first bioartificial windpipe. 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. That drama began about a decade ago when Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, working at Swedens famed Karolinska Institute, garnered headlines and accolades for replacing But as the big day approached, Alexander saw these plans unravel, and finally realised that her lover had lied about almost everything. None have been forced to hold full and independent inquiries. Team Lakay Benita Alexander and Paolo Macchiarini [Investigation Discovery]. 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. They should be. He understood how difficult her life had become. Alexander said that Macchiarini told her he was still married to his wife because they were Catholic but were separated. In early 2014, four Karolinska doctors defied the reigning culture of silence by complaining about Macchiarini. For other cases, though, doctors say the approach seems promising. He convinced the Karolinska Institute that this could make them famous, and they just let him do it. Paolo then came across Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, a man from Eritrea who was training to be a doctor when he got diagnosed with cancer. 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. After realizing other treatment methods wouldnt help, he concluded that Ms. Sein had a logical, thoughtful grasp of transplantations risks and of her health condition. Tokyo It did much the same for Macchiarinis windpipe replacements. We were doing good research, but it didnt matter I thought I was going to lose my lab, my staff everything.. Macchiarinis deceit was so outlandish, Vanity Fair sought the opinion of the Harvard professor Ronald Schouten, an expert on psychopaths, who gave this diagnosis-at-a-distance: Macchiarini is the extreme form of a con man. Still, noting that previous attempts didnt show documented success, he cautioned that longer-term results were needed before the technique should be embraced, adding, Lets see how it works and how you can do it in more patients.. As Grinnemo recalls, it nearly destroyed his career: I didnt receive any new grants. Paolo Macchiarini at a press conference in 2008. Previously considered a pioneer for using both biological and synthetic scaffolds Source: ABC Article continues below advertisement His relationship with Benita, But it did not work, and a court in Sweden has found him criminally liable for the harm As it turned out, Macchiarinis patients werent all at deaths door at the time he treated them. Ultimate Fighting Championship I can breathe, she was amazed to discover. Born in 1984, Zhadyra Iglikova suffered from tracheostomy following a car accident. Japan (LogOut/ The first person to receive one of these was Andemariam Beyene, an Eritrean doctoral student in geology at the University of Iceland. She visits Mount Sinai weekly for blood work. All but one died following severe complications with the implants. Kentucky The media began calling him "Dr. Frankenstein" and said that he committed "the world's biggest medical fraud.". 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. Paolo was a world-renowned surgeon who spoke six languages, mingled with the global elite, and resembled George Clooney. As he said in Experimenten: If I had the option of a synthetic trachea or a firing squad, Id choose the last option because it would be the least painful form of execution.. (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.). In 2010, the Italian surgeon was recruited by KIhome of the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. US Capitol There are also plenty of desperate patients who believe because theyve been told countless times that stem cells are the cure, and who cannot wait any longer for mainstream medicine. Another was a Russian mother named Julia Tuulik, per BBC News. Benita Alexander and Paolo Macchiarini in Venice, Italy [Investigation Discovery]. The coronavirus pandemic will most likely create more cases because many Covid-19 patients have needed weeks on ventilators. Dr. Paolo Macchiarini became a star by creating a bioartificial windpipe. 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. His lawyer did not respond to emails from Science today. That's when, Benita said, it hit her: She had given up a good job and spent $50,000 on a "bogus fantasy wedding" to a man who already had at least two families. The answer came only a couple of weeks later, when Swedish television began broadcasting a three-part expos of Macchiarini and his work. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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