Paolo Macchiarini misled the world over his breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, but why did most of the institutions that supported him bear no responsibility for hosting a rogue stem cell surgeon? It’s time for them to launch full and independent investigations, argue John Rasko and Carl Power
By 2008 it looked like a medical revolution was under way. Before us lay a new world, where any injured organ could be replaced with one custom-made in the laboratory. Leading us there was the charismatic Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who’d begun replacing damaged windpipes with tissue engineered ones. Each was made of a scaffold and seeded with the patients’ own stem cells, which were meant to turn it into a living, functioning organ. The era of “regenerative medicine” was upon us.
But early 2016 woke us from this dream. Swedish television broadcast Experimenten , a blistering three part investigation into Macchiarini,1 exposing him as a charlatan whose engineered windpipe