Fatal experiments : the downfall of a supersurgeon. Part 1: the star surgeon.

The first in a three-part series about renowned Italian surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini. He aimed to revolutionise medicine by creating a new type of synthetic organ which could save thousands of lives but ended up accused of falsifying medical documents and using terminally ill patients as human guinea pigs. In this part we visit the Swedish Karolinska Institute where Lindquist first met Macchiarini whilst he was fighting against allegations of unethical behaviour. We see experimental surgery taking place on rats to transfer a diaphragm between one rat and another. Focus then shifts to Macchiarini's key project to create a synthetic human trachea. Despite media attention and growing interest in his work, many of his operations with synthetic tracheas were not successful and he was criticised for convincing patients into opting for a surgical procedure that was doomed to fail - how could a trachea made of POSS PCU, coated in stem cells, create a whole new organ? The Karolinska Institute ignored varous warnings from other researchers however and went ahead with more experimental surgeries even though two out of the three patients who had received a synthetic trachea had died. Macchiarini thought that perhaps this was because they were too unwell to survive the surgery and so he began to seek volunteer subjects with damaged tracheas but who were not dying. The first was a young Russian woman who had a permanent tracheotomy after an accident. Her story is taken up in Part 2.