Retract or be damned: a dangerous moment for science and the public

Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, home to the Nobel Prize in medicine, found surgeon Paolo Macchiarini guilty of scientific misconduct. A subsequent district court case resulted in a suspended sentence of two years’ probation (doi:10.1136/bmj.o1516).1 To Macchiarini’s critics this was an unduly lenient punishment for years of research misconduct and harm to patients resulting from the globetrotting experimentation of a “stem cell charlatan.”Macchiarini had pioneered a regenerative technique that replaced damaged tracheas with tissue engineered ones. But he overstated his results, even lied about them. The district court’s verdict was overturned on appeal, the appeal court sentencing Macchiarini to two and a half years in prison (doi:10.1136/bmj.p1442).2 But the question remains as to why action against Macchiarini is mostly limited to Sweden when his controversial and discredited work extended to several countries and institutions.Two troubling themes emerge from John Rasko and Carl Power’s examination of Macchiarini’s legacy (doi:10.1136/bmj.p1367).3 First is the apparent…
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