In September 2010, the trachea transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was basically at the end of his career of fraud and patient abuse, found out and unwanted by everyone, because of his psychopathic tendencies. Except by Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Sweden, which pushed the recruitment process through in just 3 weeks, despite negative references and known lies in Macchiarini’s CV. Thanks to the emeritus KI professor and KI scandal chronist Johan Thyberg, I now share below some documents which Thyberg received from a confidential source, after KI told him those very documents were missing.
The central document is a report by the KI pulmonologist Sven-Erik Dahlen submitted to the Karolinska University Hospital investigator Kjell Asplund on 26 April 2016 (read here the Asplund report), as well as some of the attachments Thyberg obtained so far. KI were warned from colleagues by Florence, Barcelona and Hannover not to employ someone who was basically a lying psychopath. Yet the rector Harriet Wallberg and lead clinicians Lars-Olaf Cardell and Li Felländer-Tsai were desperate for some positive academic reviews to push the professorship through. They finally got one from London, from Macchiarini’s partner at UCL, Martin Birchall.
Totally kept under wraps so far: another London institution was apparently involved in Macchiarini’s recruitment at KI: the Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children’s clinic with big plans for trachea transplants. Swedes were quite worried to anger GOSH by rejecting Macchiarini and thus lose the collaborative opportunities. Just some months before the recruitment process started at KI, Macchiarini performed at GOSH in March 2010 a trachea transplant on a child (now one of just 2 or 3 survivors of what otherwise became basically a killing spree). That GOSH operation was another Lancet paper in the making (Elliott et al, Lancet, 2012), yet when it was finally published, Macchiarini ‘s friendship with London surgeons abruptly ended over a patent fight and the Italian was thrown off the paper. But back in 2010, a “boss at GOSH” is mentioned by Cardell as someone whom KI approached for a reference, this boss was likely the medical director Martin Elliott, who performed that trachea transplant together with Macchiarini. Continue reading “How Macchiarini was recruited to Karolinska”
