Artificial-Windpipe Surgeon Committed Misconduct

May 21, 2015

(Nature) – A famed surgeon committed scientific misconduct in his reports of how he transplanted synthetic windpipes seeded with stem cells into patients, according to an independent investigator. The investigator found that six published papers authored by Paolo Macchiarini, a thoracic surgeon at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, had misrepresented data from recipients of the artificial windpipes, or tracheas. The papers made the pioneering transplant operation sound more successful than it was, said the investigator, who was commissioned by the prestigious Karolinska Institute to examine Macchiarini’s clinical procedures.