By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
UCL has completed the investigation into the affair around their past honorary professor Paolo Macchiarini and the trachea transplants. The report avoids implicating Macchiarini’s partner Martin Birchall. The only guilty party is the nuclear physicist Alexander Seifalian.
The disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini has now been officially sacked from Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden, while also the entireContinue Reading
Paolo Macchiarini affair: I reproduce the letter Patricia Murray, Raphael Levy, Peter Wilmshurst and myself published in The BMJ on 2 March 2022. I also publish Wilmshurst’s appeal to the UCL leadership.
Videregen and UCL are now making a thymus.
My review of the new book by Paul Craddock, “Spare Parts: A Surprising History of Transplants”
The trachea-transplanting company Videregen, based in Liverpool, got another £2 million grant from UK governmental agency Innovate UK, to advance their tracheal replacement technology.
Paediatric surgeon Paolo De Coppi claims to grow all possible internal organs in his lab at UCL. Though his career started with his association with Macchiarini, and their regenerative medicine ideas sound strangely similar, De Coppi is celebrated as a modest genius poised to save lives of uncounted children, and the funding money flows.
A “defamation Complaint” was lodged with Google, against 6 of my articles and one cartoon. Each of them affects to some degree the British laryngologist Martin Birchall, professor at UCL and former close associate of scandal surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. I also show that Birchall and UCL even now continue researching plastic tracheas on pigs, for future use in humans patients. This grant is presently funded by UK government.
This is my review of the Russian book “Megagrant”, which tells of Macchiarini’s adventures with the plastic trachea, much of it played out in Russia, funded by a state Megagrant of €4.5mn. Some books are namely only good as court evidence.
In September 2010, trachea transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was basically at the end of his career of fraud and patient abuse, unwanted by everyone. Except by Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, which pushed the recruitment process through in just 3 weeks, despite warnings from colleagues in Florence, Barcelona and Hannover not to employ someone who was basically a lying psychopath. Yet Karolinska leadership was desperate for some positive reviews for Macchiarini. They finally got them from London, from UCL and GOSH.
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