Paging Dr. Scammer Paolo Macchiarini was
becoming a superstar in the medical field. His groundbreaking research on regenerative medicine
led to creating a so-called miracle surgery that was supposed to save countless lives.
Meanwhile, he was planning his dream wedding, which was to be officiated by
Pope Francis and attended by the Obamas and Vladimir Putin. He had it all,
and his rapid rise to fame was just beginning.
There was just one problem: none of it was real.
Everything Macchiarini had achieved was founded on
nothing but utter deception. There was no miracle surgery and no celebrity wedding
guests—just an endless web of lies spun through every aspect of his life. His colleagues,
his patients, and family were hoodwinked by his scams, and people died because of it.
How did Macchiarini make millions of dollars and become a celebrity off his web of lies?
School Days The epic rise
and fall of Dr. Macchiarini began back in 1986. Paolo had just graduated from school,
having earned the Italian equivalent of a Doctor of Medicine degree from
the University of Pisa in Italy. He earned his Master of Surgery from Pisa in 1991,
which he received during a 2-year stint as an assistant professor at the university.
His pursuit of higher education didn’t stop there, though. In 1997, he received a doctorate in organ
and tissue transplantation. Both certificates came from the University of Franche-Comté in France.
His credentials were impressive, and they earned him immediate work in the field. In 1999, he
became the head of thoracic and vascular surgery at Heidehaus Hanover Hospital in Hanover, Germany.
He held this position until 2004, and just two years later, he began working as an investigator
at the Institute of Biomedical Investigations in Barcelona, Spain. He also worked at the hospital
in Barcelona, putting the expert medical knowledge he had gained over decades into practice.
Magic Medicine As Paolo was coming
up in the medical field, he started conducting extensive research into regenerative medicine,
which focuses on restoring damaged tissues and organs to normal working order by manipulating
the body’s natural repair functions. His main interest was finding a way to heal
people with irreparable tracheal damage. The trachea, more commonly known as the windpipe,
is a tricky body part to navigate for a surgeon. It’s the organ responsible for the passage of
air from the throat into the lungs, so one wrong move can have deadly consequences for the patient.
Paolo wanted to create trachea transplants for those who needed them to survive. He was the who’s
who of regenerative science, and his research turned heads in the medical community. However,
there was skepticism about whether Macchiarini could produce the revolutionary transplants
he sought. In 2008, he proved those skeptics wrong. All that painstaking research paid off,
and he was ready to operate. The patient was Claudia Castillo,
a young mother from Barcelona. Due to complications from tuberculosis,
Castillo’s left lung had collapsed, and she was in dire need of immediate help.
Enter Dr. Macchiarini, whose research had led him to formulate a miracle procedure that targeted
defective tracheas. The innovative surgery would seed stem cells from Castillo’s body
with a synthetic trachea that would replace her biological one. It was a risky proposition,
but Castillo didn’t have many other options. Macchiarini insisted that his research
suggested the surgery would be successful and that Castillo would make a full recovery.
In June of 2008, Castillo officially went under the knife. Macchiarini and his team
used a donated trachea that was removed from a cadaver at the University of Padua
in Italy. As crazy as it sounds, the procedure transplanted that trachea into Castillo’s body,
and it was now the only thing keeping her alive.
It seemed like everything had gone according to plan, and Macchiarini was heralded as nothing
short of a hero. His wild idea to take a trachea straight from a medical school cadaver and put
it in someone’s body had somehow worked, and he had saved a life because of it. For now.
Super Surgeon His experimental procedure disrupted
the common consensus regarding what was and wasn’t possible in the realm of regenerative medicine,
and it earned him a spot at one of the most prestigious medical schools in the entire
world. In 2010, Macchiarini was invited to join the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm,
Sweden, serving as a visiting professor and part-time surgeon at the university hospital.
For those unaware, the people who work as part of the Karolinska Institute’s network
of medical professionals represent the cream of the crop in the medical field.
The university’s Nobel Assembly, which consists of 50 Karolinska professors,
is the committee responsible for selecting Nobel Prize winners for medicine.
Paolo Macchiarini was now working among those elite individuals, and it was all thanks to
his groundbreaking trachea surgery, which he had now performed on multiple patients.
The lucky recipients of his donor tracheas included a ten-year-old boy from Ireland
born with a trachea that was just 1 millimeter wide and a dying woman in Russia. Macchiarini
worked with Russian surgeon Vladimir Parshin to help heal her. Paolo continued to lay roots in
Russia, giving a master class in 2010 at the behest of Russian politician Mikhail Batin.
His Russian ties saw him appointed at Kuban State Medical University,
one of the oldest medical schools in Russia. In 2011, he was granted money by the university
and the Russian government to conduct a special research project. He also received an
honorary doctorate from Kuban State, yet another certificate to add to his impressive collection.
Later in 2011, Macchiarini exploded into the public eye. While he had already established
himself within the international medical community, he had not yet become a household
name to the rest of the world. That was about to change. Macchiarini and his medical team
conducted another trachea transplant in June of 2011, but this one was a little different
from his previous procedures. Instead of using a donor trachea to operate, Macchiarini collaborated
with scientists at University College London to produce a synthetic trachea of their own design,
which would allow them to tailor it more closely to the patient’s specific needs.
After a successful surgery, the story blew up,
garnering Macchiarini a front-page spotlight in The New York Times. For the next 3 years,
Macchiarini continued to perform his innovative trachea transplants on various patients worldwide.
In total, 17 individuals received Maccharini’s plastic trachea, and his growing stature in
the medical field had helped him blossom into a genuine celebrity.
Lights, Camera, Love He caught the attention
of important figures at one of America’s biggest television networks, NBC, including
TV personality Meredith Viera. Viera wanted to make a documentary highlighting Macchiarini’s
trailblazing medical research and the many lives he was supposedly saving through his work.
She spearheaded the creation of a Dateline special called “A Leap of Faith,” which centered around
Macchiarini’s extraordinary accomplishments. While the piece was still in production,
Macchiarini became romantically involved with one of the doc’s producers, Benita Alexander.
Alexander committed one of the cardinal sins of journalism; she fell in love with the subject
of her story. But their courtship persisted all the same. What began as a secret affair between
a producer and the larger-than-life subject of her documentary evolved into a very real and very
passionate relationship. The couple fell in love. By the time “A Leap of Faith” premiered in 2014,
the wedding bells were officially ringing for Macchiarini and his now-fiance.
They prepared for an extravagant celebration that would rival the royal wedding.
World leaders like the Obamas and Vladimir Putin would be in attendance.
Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli would perform the music.
World-renowned Italian restaurant Enoteca Pinchiorri would cater the event.
The cherry on top of the wedding cake was his claim that Pope Francis would officiate the
wedding! How exactly was Macchiarini able to pull it all off? He had supposedly become the personal
doctor for all of these famous individuals. No one questioned him on it, not even his bride-to-be.
Macchiarini had such an intoxicating aura to his personality that it was hard not to be swept up
in his grand persona. However, as the wedding day approached, that persona started to split at the
seams, and the towering house of cards Macchiarini had built for himself began its epic collapse.
Inconvenient Truth As it turns out,
nearly everything that was known about Paolo Macchiarini was untrue. He had
hidden the truth beneath an endless stream of lies, lies that encompassed his entire life,
both personally and professionally. For starters, he was not the personal doctor of
any of the high-profile individuals he claimed to be associated with. He had never met the Obamas,
never crossed paths with Putin, and never treated the Pope. A spokesman for Pope Francis said that
he had never heard of anyone by the name of “Paolo Macchiarini,” and he wouldn’t
have agreed to officiate his wedding anyway, as he doesn’t condone the act of remarriage.
That’s right. Paolo had already been married to another woman
for 30 years. The couple had children together. Macchiarini’s new fiance had been kept in the
dark about his secret family. Had she known he had a wife and kids,
she would have never initiated their romance in the first place. But Macchiarini intended to lead
a double life—a responsible husband and father in one breath—a slick bachelor looking for love
in another. His entire life was predicated on the elaborate deceptions he fabricated.
He tried to have his cake and eat it too. In the end, he was left with no family at all. The
disintegration of his fractured personal life was only the beginning of the end.
More and more of Macchiarini’s lies came to light. Questions regarding the legitimacy of his famed
miracle surgery arose around this time as well. While his patients had all recovered reasonably
well in the months that followed their operations, many of them developed additional health
complications as time passed—complications that stemmed directly from their trachea transplants.
Seven of the people that Macchiarini operated on actually died. Macchiarini was content to
chalk their demise to the patients’ existing health problems rather than anything related
to his transplants. Other professionals in the medical field felt differently.
The medical community closely scrutinized Macchiarini’s research on regenerative medicine
once his patients started dying. What they found were severe inconsistencies and, in some cases,
outright lies riddled throughout the research documents Macchiarini had written over his career.
He had falsified a number of the claims he made to fast-track his experimental surgery before it
could be properly examined. He knew that it would never be green-lit under normal circumstances,
so he bent the truth to get his way. He didn’t care about the fatal consequences such
reckless medical malpractice would have on his patients. He just wanted the fame and fortune
that came with making such a groundbreaking discovery. Nothing else mattered. For a while,
his ruse was working. But a lie this big will always come to light—
something scammers, cheats, and liars never realize until it’s too late.
Blame Game It’s easy to pin the passings
of Macchiarini’s patients on the celebrity surgeon himself, and the majority of the blame
certainly belongs on his shoulders. But let’s not overlook the people that enabled his gross
negligence along the way. He had been permitted to join the vaunted Karolinska Institute back in
2010 even though he had several references that spoke poorly of him and his research practices.
He had even falsified some of the credentials that appeared on his resume. Macchiarini’s tendency to
cut corners wasn’t anything new by the time he was cooking up his phony trachea surgery. He had
always tried to take the easy route. Up until the bodies started dropping, he was allowed to.
The whole charade led to changes at the top of the Karolinska Institute. The secretary of the
university’s Nobel Assembly resigned in 2016 due to his strong support of Macchiarini’s recruitment
in 2010. He was soon joined by the institution’s vice-chancellor, who had cleared Macchiarini of
scientific misconduct despite the blatant evidence against him. Karolinska then ended
their affiliation with Macchiarini entirely, but this was already long after people started dying.
It seems that Macchiarini had been given special treatment at every turn,
perhaps due to his smooth-talking demeanor or perhaps because his growing status as a
celebrity made it difficult for people to question him. The brightest stars often blind people;
Macchiarini was as close to superstardom as a doctor can get. As his fame grew,
it was impossible to stop its momentum. He had a strong base of supporters who were willing
to defend him even after his patients died. But those supporters eventually
disappeared. Macchiarini was forced to face the consequences of his actions, disgraced and alone.
Legal Responsibility It was not long after
the rug was pulled out from under Macchiarini’s life that the legal proceedings began. In June
of 2016, Swedish authorities investigated Macchiarini for involuntary manslaughter.
7 people died. All of them had been operated on by Macchiarini shortly before
their passing. All of them had died from complications that could be directly connected
to Macchiarini’s unproven plastic tracheas. The case seems pretty cut and dry, right?
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. Prosecutors found it extremely difficult to prove Macchiarini
was legally responsible for his patients’ passing. While it seems pretty obvious to anyone paying
attention that the celebrity doctor had a hand in it, it was hard to prove beyond a shadow of
a doubt that Macchiarini killed those people and not their underlying diseases. The charges were
dropped in 2017, but the legal troubles were only just beginning. In 2019,
Macchiarini was sentenced to 16 months in an Italian prison for abuse of office and forging
documents. The grieving families of Macchiarini’s victims wanted the doctor locked up for good.
This verdict in Italian court wasn’t exactly what they had in mind. But at least it was something.
In September of 2020, Macchiarini was indicted for aggravated assault after Swedish authorities had
reopened their case against him. After new pieces of evidence were obtained, prosecutors believed
they had enough to charge him. Macchiarini has continued to proclaim his innocence. But
those claims have fallen on deaf ears. To the people he hurt, he is public enemy number one,
and they will stop at nothing to make sure he’s held responsible for his reckless behavior.
Facade It’s been a
wild fall from grace for the man once seen as the potential savior of the human race.
The discoveries he claimed to have made in regenerative medicine were supposed to open up
all-new possibilities for how doctors treat patients with incurable health issues.
But like everything else in his life, that was all a lie. Once the facade crumbled, the whole tower
came down. Macchiarini went from a beloved miracle worker to infamous fraud in a matter of months.
What awaits him in criminal court? We’ll have to wait and see.
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