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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGroper Don the Con has company - Dr Con Man: the rise and fall of a celebrity scientist who fooled
almost everyone
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/01/paolo-macchiarini-scientist-surgeon-rise-and-fall
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Scientific pioneer, superstar surgeon, miracle worker thats how Paolo Macchiarini was known for several years. Dressed in a white lab coat or in surgical scrubs, with his broad, handsome face and easy charm, he certainly looked the part. And fooled almost everyone.
Macchiarini shot to prominence back in 2008, when he created a new airway for Claudia Castillo, a young woman from Barcelona. 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. Castillo was soon back home, chasing after her kids. According to Macchiarini and his colleagues, her artificial organ was well on the way to looking and functioning liked a natural one. And because it was built from Castillos own cells, she didnt need to be on any risky immunosuppressant drugs.
This was Macchiarinis first big success. Countless news stories declared it a medical breakthrough. A life-saver and a game-changer. We now know that wasnt true. However, the serious complications that Castillo suffered were, for a long time, kept very quiet.
Meanwhile, Macchiarinis career soared. 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. There he reinvented his technique. Instead of stripping the cells from donor windpipes, Macchiarini had plastic scaffolds made to order. The first person to receive one of these was Andemariam Beyene, an Eritrean doctoral student in geology at the University of Iceland. His recovery put Macchiarini on the front page of the New York Times.
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MUST READ - lots more at link
PdxSean
(574 posts)Before republicans hear about this guy and nominate him for president for 2020. Worse, if it turns out he was groping his female patients, he'll draw evangelical voters like gnats to a compost bin.
Funny but this criminal killed people
hlthe2b
(102,276 posts)and was absolutely amazed--more like shocked give the degree of immune response to any kind of foreign cell or object in the respirator system and plastic tracheal scaffolding? Wow...
This is so tragic. Those poor patients.
Stuart G
(38,427 posts)Oh, and I found this..about this fellow: In March 2017, he was fired by Russia...he was doing some work there, but the Russian science community..did not renew his contract...took them a while to figure that out...
So, with out further ado . ....here is that link on losing his job in Russia, from Science Mag:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/superstar-surgeon-fired-again-time-russia
I found this...about this con artist:
After Experimenten aired in Sweden and a few publications about Macchiarini appeared in the Russian press, an audit by the Federal Service for Supervision of Healthcare of the Krasnodar hospital revealed that he had operated without a Russian medical license and had filed no documentation about the materials in the artificial windpipe with the state register. The hospital was ordered to correct those violations, but no sanctions were imposed.