Paolo Macchiarini could have been plucked from the pages of a Mills & Boon novel. The handsome Italian thoracic surgeon speaks six languages and a decade ago gained global attention for his pioneering use of plastic windpipes. His ultimate aim was almost godlike: ending the need for human organ donation.
The world was charmed. Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet – home of the Nobel Prize for Medicine – gave him surgical teams and access to funding, sick patients sought him out and begged him to save their lives, and journalists from around the world lined up to meet him.
Benita Alexander was one of them. In her mid-40s in 2013 and an award-winning producer for NBC News, she was no naive ingénue. Macchiarini’s plastic trachea transplants, which were coated in the patient’s own stem cells prior to implantation, had caught her eye and she planned to profile him as he operated on a two-year-old girl who had been born without a windpipe.
What followed was a love affair between Alexander and Macchiarini that would ultimately upend her life. But at that point all she saw was a man who had found the solution to two of medicine’s biggest problems: organ rejection and the lack of donors.
“Now I believe that he is, at a minimum, a pathological liar, but more likely a sociopath or a psychopath, but then, I thought he would change the world,” says Alexander over Zoom from her home in New York. “He is like a spider who slowly draws you into his web – but it is done with such skill that you have no idea what’s happening.”
Her story is the subject of two upcoming TV programmes: Dr Death, a true crime drama starring Mandy Moore and Edgar Ramírez, which is due to be released around Christmas on Peacock TV; and a Netflix documentary, Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, which premieres on Monday.
Footage in the Netflix series shows the first meeting between Alexander and Macchiarini, who was 54 at the time. He comes across as a hugely appealing figure – gently talking to the sick toddler and her parents, and flirting with Alexander.
“I was very vulnerable and that’s when men like him pounce,” says Alexander, who was dealing with a separation and her ex-husband’s brain cancer diagnosis. As for why he chose her: “I think it was partly the thrill – the smarter the woman and the bigger the institution he conned, the greater the rush. But he also might have guessed what was brewing in Sweden and thought I could one day help him.”
Soon, she was breaking one of the cardinal rules of journalism: don’t fall in love with the interviewee. “Straight away it felt like I was floating in clouds. I was giddy,” she says. And yet during the same period that Macchiarini was whisking her off to Venice and Greece, his medical work was being questioned.
Monsters disguised as heroes are well-known tropes. They terrify and fascinate us – and egotistically we tend to think we wouldn’t fall for their lies. So when Matthias Corbascio, Karl-Henrik Grinnemo and Oscar Simonson, three Swedish surgeons working alongside Macchiarini at the Karolinska, started to suspect that their colleague was lying about the success of his surgeries, they initially doubted themselves.
“I was the first of the whistleblowers to work with him,” says the softly-spoken Simonson. “He was extremely charming and had a lot of charisma. I remember his first presentation about his vision – he arrived in his Italian suit and scarf, and he talked very quietly so we all had to lean forward to hear, but he completely took over the room.”
Macchiarini’s intention was clear: to one day be able to replace every organ in the human body with stem-cell coated plastic…
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