By Leonid Schneider, on research integrity, biomedical ethics and academic publishing
“I felt I had a lot to give the world. Getting my first at university and doing so well in research was an antidote. Underneath, though, there is part of me that feels maybe one day someone will discover that I am stupid.” – Tony “Blue Peter” Hollander
The 2008 Lancet paper of Paolo Macchiarini and Martin Birchall about the world first trachea transplant might end up retracted. Until recently, the journal’s editor Richard Horton used to ignore and suppress “non peer-reviewed” evidence, but due to combined pressure of activism, media and politics, things started to move.
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.
This is the English original of my story for Hipertextual, first published in Spanish on 27.10.2016. What did we learn from the tracheaContinue Reading
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