They are called Anders Hamsten and Harriet Wallberg: these two members of the jury of the Nobel Prize in Medicine were dismissed at the beginning of September 2016. The reason? They are suspected of having turned a blind eye to a major medical scandal.
The story begins in 2008. At only 50 years old, Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian surgeon, performs the first trachea-artery transplant from a deceased person: in the process, he compares himself to “Doctor Frankenstein”. In 2011, the surgeon repeated the feat with an artificial plastic organ, under the direction of the Karolinska Institute (in Sweden).
Except that in 2013, the scandal broke out: two of his patients died and the third was in an alarming state. Macchiarini is now accused of manslaughter: he faces six years in prison. In March 2016, he was licensed by the Karolinska Institute.
Have they closed their eyes?
Problem: Anders Hamsten and Harriet Wallberg were successively the deans of the Karolinska Institute. According to a report published by this institute on September 9, 2016, they would have repeatedly ignored warnings about him, turned a blind eye to certain errors and inaccuracies on his CV and overlooked work that proved to be inaccurate or with questionable conclusions. “We are here in the presence of a chain of bad decisions which allowed a professor to go against elementary ethics” reads the report.
Last element, the three patients who were victims of Macchiarini were operated on for trachea transplants, but were not “sick enough to attempt this experimental procedure”. Worse, “gray areas remain as to the way in which the consent for these operations was obtained”.
Conclusion? On September 6, 2016, the spokesperson for the Nobel assembly declared: “the crisis of confidence is such (…) that we are going to ask Harriet Wallberg and Anders Hamsten to leave the Nobel assembly”. A case worthy of a detective story …
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