Swedish Central Ethics Review Board finds Macchiarini guilty of misconduct, requests retraction of 6

Cheshire

Cheshire

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
The Expert Group on Scientific Misconduct has on request from the Karolinska Institut (KI) delivered a Statement in a case where Paolo Macchiarini is one of the researchers accused of scientific misconduct.
The case comprises six articles which mainly deals with transplantation of synthetic tracheas. These articles have previously been reviewed by Professor Bengt Gerdin, who found scientific misconduct in all six articles. Despite that, KI choose to clear Paolo Macchiarini and the co-authors. KI have thereafter opened the case again.
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https://forbetterscience.com/2017/1...f-misconduct-requests-retraction-of-6-papers/

Reminder: 2 of the 6 articles were published in The Lancet (who published The PACE trial main paper)
 
Kalliope said:
The Lancet is retracting!

The Lancet: The final verdict on Paolo Macchiarini: guilty of misconduct

In this issue, we are retracting two papers by Paolo Macchiarini and co-authors after receiving requests to do so from the new President of the Karolinska Institute (KI), Ole Petter Ottersen.

ETA: I am tagging you @dave30th as you might find this of interest
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That piece from the Lancet was rather less than soul searching.

Here's their earlier coverage:

2015: Paolo Macchiarini is not guilty of scientific misconduct
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)00118-X/fulltext

2016: Paolo Macchiarini—science in conflict

We take all allegations of scientific misconduct extremely seriously. The Lancet's view has been, and remains, that the normal standards of justice should apply to Paolo Macchiarini. Being innocent until proven guilty is a difficult principle to hold on to when calls for action now to assuage the crisis are so vociferous.
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https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)00341-X/fulltext

The Lancet takes an 'innocent until proven guilty' approach to scientific misconduct by researchers, seemingly while doing all they can to avoid investigating concerns about their work.
 
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Karolinska institutet, where Macchiarini worked, has now had an investigation and it seems the new Rector of the institute, Ole Petter Ottersen, is under suspicion for research misconduct. He was a co-author on a paper in Journal of Neuroscience in 1999, about a specific brain receptor, and three pictures seems to have been duplicated in the same paper. He is highly respected and was hired to get the institute back on track after the Macchiarini-commotion.

What a mess..

Khrono: Dagens nyheter: Ottersen mistenkt for forskningsfusk
google translation: Ottersen suspected of research fraud
 
Long blog post on some events around the Macchiarini scandal, including events involving COPE.
On 4 March 2019, The Lancet published a piece of Correspondence, authored by Laureano Molins, head of thoracic surgery at Hospital Clinic Barcelona in Spain. This short letter, hardly noticed by anyone, opened a new chapter in the trachea transplant scandal of the thoracic surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. The issue here is the seminal paper Macchiarini et al 2008, which described the first ever trachea transplant using a bioengineered decellularised cadaveric graft. To this day it is being paraded as an example of a success story, even after the scandal of Macchiarini’s deadly plastic tracheas made worldwide news and eventually led to two retractions in Lancet, in particular Jungebluth et al, Lancet 2011. The journal was very reluctant to retract that 2011 paper, and has been fighting tooth and nail to protect Macchiarini et al 2008. Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton is convinced that he is a victim of a harassment campaign, and that Macchiarini is a perfectly trustworthy medical colleague who just happens to be vilified. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which Horton co-founded, apparently shares this view.
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https://forbetterscience.com/2019/0...-at-the-lancet/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
 
Esther12 said:
That piece from the Lancet was rather less than soul searching.

Here's their earlier coverage:

2015: Paolo Macchiarini is not guilty of scientific misconduct
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)00118-X/fulltext

2016: Paolo Macchiarini—science in conflict



https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)00341-X/fulltext

The Lancet takes an 'innocent until proven guilty' approach to scientific misconduct by researchers, seemingly while doing all they can to avoid investigating concerns about their work.
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Didn't the Lancet publish a similar piece about how Wakefield was unjustifiably attacked and that they stand by the paper?

Almost looks like a pattern if you look for, oh... about 3-4 seconds.
 
Disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who faked research relating to dangerous and largely discredited tracheal transplants, has been handed a 16 month prison sentence in Italy for forging documents and abuse of office.

Macchiarini made headlines around the world after claiming a major breakthrough for patients with failing windpipes, by “seeding” an artificial scaffold with a patient’s own stem cells, to generate a functioning trachea.
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Paywall, https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l6676
 
Swedish media reports that the whistle blowers in the Macchiarini case are now seeking compensation.

The so-called whistleblowers in the Macchiarini scandal at Karolinska Institutet are now demanding compensation from the state. These are the researchers who alerted that the surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was cheating on research and results of transplants with artificial trachea.

The whistleblowers think that they were subjected to reprisals after they alerted about Macchiarini and that they never had the opportunity to defend themselves.

- Karolinska has invested all its gun powder on trying to smear us in different ways. And probably that kind of reprisal will be lifelong, ”says Oscar Simonson.

Sveriges radio: Visselblåsarna i Macchiarini-fallet kräver ersättning av staten
google translation: The whistle blowers in the Macchiarini case demands compensation from the government
 
This is announced by the Public Prosecutor's Office today in a press release. It describes how new interrogations were held during the continued preliminary investigation and new written evidence was collected.

- It has become clear to me that the interventions were carried out in violation of science and proven experience and therefore did not form part of any legal form of healthcare or licensed research study. The interventions, which have caused the three plaintiffs serious physical injuries and great suffering, have thus been carried out completely without legal support. I make the assessment that the three interventions are therefore to be assessed as aggravated assault rather than causing bodily injury, aggravated crime, says Mikael Björk in the press release.

Dagens Medicin: Paolo Macchiarini åtalas
google translation: Paolo Macchiarini is being charged
 
Nature Swedish research misconduct agency swamped with cases in first year

Quotes:
Experts had warned that the nascent agency could be overwhelmed, and say that the high number of cases could be down to researchers feeling more comfortable about reporting suspicions to an independent agency than to their own institutions, as they did under the previous system.

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Sweden created the agency after trust in its science was shaken by the case of star surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, formerly at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Macchiarini was eventually found guilty of misconduct relating to trials of an experimental trachea-transplant method, after being cleared by three in-house investigations that were later deemed to be flawed by an independent investigation commissioned by the institute.

Following the scandal, an inquiry led by Margaretha Fahlgren, a literature researcher at Uppsala University, suggested that Sweden establish a government body to handle allegations of serious research fraud — defined as fabrication, falsification or plagiarism — at publicly funded institutions. In 2019, parliament passed a law to define research misconduct and establish the NPOF. The agency began operating in January 2020.

In its first-year report, the NPOF said that 30 of the 46 cases it investigated concerned medicine, health and natural sciences — although it received referrals from all research areas except agricultural science and veterinary medicine. The 46 cases included 56 incidents of alleged misconduct, with 10 relating to fabrication, 18 to forgery, 18 to plagiarism and 10 about other matters.
 
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