The Nobel Prize for Medicine committee is splitting two of its members, accused of covering up an Italian surgeon involved in a scandal.
They belonged to the jury of the sacrosanct Nobel of medicine. Each year, the two professors selected the laureates and gave them access to the ultimate scientific recognition. But Harriet Wallberg and Anders Hamsten will have to give up this prestigious role. In question: the scandal in which they are entangled. A dark affair that claimed the lives of two people.
Harriet Wallberg is the former Dean of the Karolinska Institute (KI), Sweden; Anders Hamsten succeeded him in this post. It is in these places that a particularly controversial experiment, led by the Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, was carried out in 2011. It was then the world’s first transplant of an artificial trachea-artery covered with stem cells. Three surgeries were performed in Stockholm.
Manslaughter
Two patients died and the third came out very weak. He had to receive care for several years. Investigations carried out following the operations revealed that the Italian surgeon’s practices did not respect fundamental medical and ethical rules. The man is also targeted by a Swedish police investigation for manslaughter.
Harriet Wallberg was Dean when this physician was recruited. His hiring is now perceived as a serious error in judgment and suspicions weigh around his possible desire to cover up the affair. Anders Hamsten, meanwhile, pays a reaction deemed too late, not having measured the extent of the scandal.
“The crisis of confidence is such (…) that we are going to ask them to leave the Nobel Assembly”, explained its secretary, Thomas Perlmann, to the Swedish agency TT. Both were among the fifty members of the Nobel Assembly which validates the choices of laureates proposed by the five members of a suitable committee.
According to its statutes, no one can be fired, but the two scientists were pushed towards the exit. Neither of them participated in the work to designate the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine, according to Thomas Perlmann. The name of the winner (s) must be announced on October 3.
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