Research body finds surgeon guilty of misconduct

The Swedish organisation in charge of reviewing research has judged that scandal-hit surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was guilty of scientific misconduct for misleadingly describing synthetic trachea operations as successful in a series of research articles, writes Lee Roden for The Local.

Earlier in October, prosecutors dropped a manslaughter probe against Macchiarini over Swedish synthetic trachea operations carried out in 2011 and 2012, after which three patients died. Macchiarini's research has also come under fire. In 2014, four doctors at Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital reported him to the then president of the Karolinska Institute for allegedly distorting the facts about his operations when presenting them in scientific journals. The articles were subsequently reviewed in 2015 by Uppsala University Surgical Sciences Professor Bengt Gerdin, who concluded that Macchiarini was guilty of research misconduct, but the institute’s overall assessment was to clear him and the co-authors.

However, the Karolinska Institute later decided that the matter should be investigated again, asking the Expert Group on Scientific Misconduct at the Central Ethical Review Board to review six of the surgeon's articles on the transplantation of synthetic tracheas, and the conclusion by the experts presented last week was that scientific misconduct can be found in all six.
Full report on The Local site