A star surgeon's synthetic windpipe transplants killed seven of eight patients

Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian thoracic surgeon, was recruited in 2010 as a visiting professor at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet — the prestigious university that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was celebrated as a pioneer of regenerative medicine for implanting synthetic tracheas (windpipes) seeded with patients' own stem cells, a technique that promised to save people with damaged airways.

But the operations were not what they seemed. Macchiarini performed the experimental surgeries without adequate evidence that they worked, and in some cases on patients who were not desperately ill. The results were catastrophic: of the eight patients who received his synthetic trachea transplants, seven died. Whistleblowers at Karolinska raised alarms, but the institution initially protected him; a 2015 inquiry cleared him of misconduct, and the vice-chancellor who endorsed that finding later resigned.

The scandal unraveled after investigative journalism and a Swedish TV documentary exposed the truth. The secretary of the Nobel Committee resigned over his role in recruiting Macchiarini, and Karolinska finally cut ties. Macchiarini was convicted in Sweden of causing bodily harm — initially a suspended sentence, later increased to two and a half years in prison — and was also convicted of research-related crimes in Italy. Eleven of his papers were retracted. The case stands as one of the most serious examples of medical research fraud, with a direct and tragic human cost.