Science journalism by Leonid Schneider, on research integrity and academic publishing in life sciences and biomedicine
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.
Elite journal Nature Cell Biology (NCB) requests deposition of raw data, in particular original scans of western blots and other gel analyses. Spanish star cancer researcher Carlos López-Otín, winner of 2017 Nature Mentoring Award, instead deposited whatever odd gel picture his lab had available, counting that nobody will bother to check. Yet readers did.
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.
Videregen, the Liverpool-based company which bought the trachea regeneration patent from UCL, deployed lawyers against the academics Patricia Murray and Raphael Levy, precisely via their employer University of Liverpool. Main issue is the parliamentary submission by Levy and Murray, subject to absolute privilege. Yet Videregen also cites from the confidential notice of suspected research misconduct Murray and Levy submitted in good faith to UCL.
Another one of Paolo Macchiarini’s past trachea transplant patients has died on 9 July 2018. She received from Macchiarini a cadaveric decellurised trachea in December 2010. By 2018, Zhadyra’s situation critically deteriorated, the dying patient was used for another experiment. On June 5th 2018, Zhadyra received in Moscow another trachea transplant. Responsible was same Parshin who performed the first trachea transplant together with Macchiarini.
The travesty around the data faking regenerative medicine enthusiast Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson is finally over. Her Swedish employer University of Gotheburg announced to sack her as university professor. Retractions of 7 papers were requested
Paloma was supposed to the second trachea transplant patient of Paolo Macchiarini’s in Barcelona, in summer 2008. The scandal surgeon gave her a fake diagnosis of a lethal tracheal cancer which she never had, and also “accidentally” mislocated her stent during a enforced bronchoscopy. All to coerce his patient to agree to a trachea transpalnt. Paloma had a lucky escape, twice. She namely also encountered Thorsten Walles.
Karolinska Institutet announced its decision on 6 papers by their former professor and surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini. All are to be retracted, 7 scientists were found guilty of research misconduct, including one of the whistleblowers.
In the aftermath of the scandal around Paolo Macchiarini, which left many patients dead, his former employer Karolinska Institutet requested a retraction a paper. The Swiss-German medical publisher Karger and its journal Respiration however categorically refused and ordered KI not “to patronize the readers of the journal ‘Respiration’.” The German Editor-in-Chief had namely a huge conflict of interest.
In 2017, UCL invited an external expert commission to investigate the deadly trachea transplants performed by the former UCL honorary professor Paolo Macchiarini. An already sacked UCL nanotechnology professor, Alexander Seifalian, whose lab made the two UCL plastic POSS-PCU tracheas in 2011, was announced as the main culprit on UCL side. All this despite Seifalian’s having had no clinical role, training or ambitions, as he professed in his interview to the investigative committee, which I now obtained.
