Fatal Experiments: The Downfall of a Supersurgeon — Season 1, Episode 3: Part 3
Documentary • 59 min • 1 season, 3 episodes • ★ 10.0/10
Episode synopsis
By 2014, four Karolinska doctors started to question Macchiarini's transplantation of plastic tracheas and raised the alarm at Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institute. They suspected that Macchiarini had been lying in his scientific papers and that patients' lives were being put at risk by a technique which had not been properly tested or investigated beforehand. But still his employer, the Karolinska Institute, defended him and claimed nothing was amiss.
About Fatal Experiments: The Downfall of a Supersurgeon
The series investigates Paolo Macchiarini’s claims to have invented a ground-breaking method to create new organs. His method using plastic tracheas sown with stemcells has been operated on patients in the US, Russia, Sweden and the UK. So far, unfortunately, the track record of his plastic organs is not very good. Almost all patients are dead. And several of his former surgeon colleagues in Sweden claim that not only does the method not work, but that his scientific claim to fame is based on falsified and misrepresented data. Some even claim that his patients have been used as human guinea-pigs.