HOW A TRAILBLAZING SURGEON WHO CLAIMED TO PERFORM MIRACLES WAS EXPOSED AS A FRAUD
Once admired and highly respected, Paolo Macchiarini was considered a “super-surgeon”. The Swiss-Italian thoracic expert, who claimed to count the Pope, Barack Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton among his patients, became renowned internationally for creating the world’s first plastic organs. Apioneer in ground-breaking stem cell medicine, Macchiarini gave new hope with his experimental trachea transplant operations, which seemingly replaced windpipes affected by illnesses such as cancer with lab-grown plastic versions infused with the patient’s own stem cells. But his reputation started crumbling when his patients kept dying after their operations.
And, as the death toll started to mount up in what’s been called “the biggest con in medical history”, everything started to crash down on Macchiarini, whose story is told in Netflix’s new docuseries Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife.
GOD-LIKE STATUS
Highly qualified, with experience at some of the world’s leading universities and medical schools, Macchiarini’s career really took off after he joined the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. It’s one of the world’s foremost medical research establishments, awarding the annual Nobel Prize for medicine. Kalle Grinnemo, who was apart of Macchiarini’s team there, said in the docuseries, “When Paolo arrived, he was asuperstar. He had an aura around him, he was mesmerising. Paolo was like amessiah for organ regeneration. He once said, ‘There is no person above me except God.’ His vision was to regenerate windpipes from plastic material covered with the patient’s own stem cells. And, if it worked at the Karolinska, they wanted to make aclinic around Paolo.” He continued, “For me, he was aperson to really look up to. He made us feel like we were part of the future of organ transplantation.”
Macchiarini’s real breakthrough came when he created the first synthetic trachea in 2011 and performed alandmark transplant on Andemariam Beyene, a 36-year-old African graduate student living in Iceland, who had been diagnosed with life-threatening tracheal cancer. Macchiarini was heralded internationally after he led ateam to carry out the op in June 2011, which initially seemed to be successful. The ground-breaking procedure received media coverage world wide.
Having heard about the surgery, American dad-of-one Christopher Lyles thought he had found the solution to help him beat his tracheal cancer, after being given aprognosis of six months. “We thought Macchiarini was the best of the best. He gave us hope when no one else did,” said Christopher’s sister Erica Greene. After 15 hours of surgery at the Karolinska in November 2011, the operation was deemed asuccess until Christopher developed a
