Get to Know the True Story of the 'Dr. Death' Season 2 Doctor
Based on the hit Wondery podcast of the same name, the first season of Peacock’s Dr. Death chronicled the horrifying story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch, a Texas neurosurgeon who left multiple patients maimed. The show was renewed for a second season last year as an ongoing anthology series, with each new season charting a different “medical true crime” story.
Interestingly, the case covered in Season 2 of the TV show is not the same one featured in the podcast’s second season. The latter focused on Dr. Farid Fata, a cancer doctor who poisoned and defrauded hundreds of patients. The TV show’s second season, on the other hand, will chronicle the story of Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a once-renowned Italian surgeon played by Edgar Ramirez. Earlier this year, Macchiarini was the subject of the three-part Netflix docuseries, Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife. Read on for more about Paolo Macchiarini's case.
Related: How to Watch 'Dr. Death' Season 2
Who is Paolo Macchiarini?
Photo by Magnus ANDERSSON / TT NEWS AGENCY / AFP) / Sweden OUT (Photo by MAGNUS ANDERSSON/TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP via Getty Images
Born in the late 1950s in Basel, Switzerland, Macchiarini studied medicine at the University of Pisa in Italy. As he continued his studies, he obtained further qualifications in surgery, with a specialism in organ and tissue transplants. After many years of practicing and teaching medicine at various institutions across Europe, Macchiarini took a job as a visiting professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and also worked as a part-time surgeon at its affiliated teaching hospital.
In his new position, Macchiarini set out to revolutionize the field of regenerative medicine, which is devoted to developing tools that can repair or regrow damaged human cells and tissues. In 2011, he created the world’s first synthetic windpipe and implanted it into a patient. Per The New York Times, this groundbreaking procedure involved “replacing a damaged trachea with a plastic replica that had been soaked in the patient’s stem cells.” Macchiarini had come up with the idea of using the patient’s own stem cells in order to avoid transplant rejection, a serious complication in which the body’s immune system attacks a transplanted organ.
After the groundbreaking success of his first synthetic windpipe transplant, Macchiarini became a world-renowned star physician, and performed a total of 20 further tracheal regeneration procedures in the U.S., the UK, Russia and Spain. But even as he was being lauded by news outlets across the globe, Macchiarini was concealing a staggering web of negligence and lies. And soon, his patients began to pay the price.
Related: 50 True Crime Podcasts Worthy of an Immediate Binge
What happened to Paolo Macchiarini’s patients?
Shortly after Macchiarini began performing the surgeries, several colleagues in the field of thoracic surgery became alarmed by the potential harms of these synthetic windpipes, and some went so far as to accuse Macchiarini of manipulating his results. In a 2015 article published in the Journal of Thoracic Disease, Dr. Pierre Delaere and Dr. Dirk Van Raemdonck wrote that “the optimism surrounding organ regeneration has proved to be completely unfounded. In fact, the engineered trachea is an example of blatant scientific deception.”
And this deception had deadly consequences. According to the biomedical researcher Leonard Schneider, who published a detailed article documenting all 20 of the procedures Macchiarini was known to have performed, almost all of his patients ended up dying, and the few who survived had serious medical complications.
For example, one of Macchiarini’s longest-surviving patients was a Turkish woman named Yesim Cetir. After having a synthetic windpipe transplanted in 2012, her condition began to rapidly deteriorate, and she ultimately spent more than three years in intensive care at Karolinska University Hospital, where she underwent more than 200 surgeries to try and correct the damage that had been done. But despite these extensive efforts, she still died.
It was later reported in The Guardian that Macchiarini had never performed even the most basic safety reviews or animal trials on his synthetic windpipes, and had instead skipped directly to transplanting them into human patients. He also reportedly failed to seek the appropriate government permits and ethics approvals for the new technology—and got away with it for years.
Who was Paolo Macchiarini's girlfriend?
NBC News producer Benita Alexander was assigned to cover Macchiarini’s groundbreaking work for a special program titled Leap of Faith. Like so many others, she was seduced by his seemingly visionary talent and charisma, and the two gradually grew closer throughout Alexander’s reporting. By the end of 2013, they were romantically involved, even though Macchiarini was married at the time. According to Alexander, she fell hard for Macchiarini because he was a source of emotional support for her in a dark time—her ex-husband, the father of her daughter, was dying of brain cancer. "Paolo was a really good listener," Alexander told 20/20. "He and I started going to dinners and I was kind of pouring my heart out to him about all this stuff. He gave me really sage, solid, kind advice."
Macchiarini swept Alexander off her feet with lavish dinners and vacations, and tall tales about his supposed celebrity patients, including President Barack Obama and Pope Francis. By the end of 2013, the couple was planning a star-studded wedding, which Macchiarini promised would be officiated by the Pope himself. But after discovering that the Pope was scheduled to be elsewhere on the date of their wedding, Alexander became suspicious, per Vanity Fair. When she confronted him about the lie, Macchiarini cut off contact with her—but Alexander wasn’t about to slink away quietly. Instead, she hired private investigators to look into him, and quickly realized that his lies extended way beyond their nuptials. Eventually, in 2015, she contacted the Karolinska Institute to express her concerns about Macchiarini, and discovered that he was already under investigation there.
Was Paolo Macchiarini a sniper?
At one stage, when Alexander confronted Macchiarini with evidence that he had falsified much of the information on his resume, he responded by doubling down. He told her that if there were things about his medical career that seemed strange, it was because it was a cover. His real job? A sniper for the CIA.
"Clearly, something was very seriously wrong, and he's a pathological liar," Alexander recalled in the Netflix documentary series Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife. “But when he told me that, I thought, ‘This man’s crazy.' I mean, legitimately crazy or so demented…I didn't know what to think.”
Needless to say, Macchiarini was neither a sniper nor employed by the CIA.
Is Paolo Macchiarini still practicing medicine?
After receiving multiple complaints from other physicians, who alleged that Macchiarini had endangered the lives of his patients, flouted basic safety protocols and misrepresented his research findings, the Karolinska Institute launched an external investigation. Dr. Bengt Gerdin, the independent investigator, concluded in May of 2015 that Macchiarini was guilty. According to ABC News, Gerdin wrote in his report that Macchiarini had made false claims about improvements in his patients, failed to report severe complications from the procedure, and misrepresented patients’ records to make it appear as if they had been healthier for longer than they really had been after their surgeries. But the institute did not accept the results of the investigation, and renewed Macchiarini’s contract. It wasn’t until the following year that he was finally fired, thanks to a Vanity Fair exposé and a high-profile documentary series, both of which brought more public attention to the case.
Ole Petter Ottersen, president of the Karolinska Institute since 2017, told ABC News: "It is obvious that KI's initial handling of this case was insufficient and inadequate on several points. It has led to extensive reform work internally at KI in order to improve and clarify a number of regulations and routines."
“The Karolinska Institute was seduced by Macchiarini,” said Gerdin, per The New York Times. “He was one of the best con-men I have ever come across. He convinced the Karolinska Institute that this could make them famous, and they just let him do it. Not only that, they later covered it up.”
Information is scarce regarding Macchiarini’s current professional status, but according to The independent, he is “not believed to be” practicing medicine any more.
Where is Paolo Macchiarini now?
In 2022, a Swedish court found Macchiarini guilty of one felony count of “causing bodily harm,” and not guilty on other charges including aggravated assault, charges all related to the thoracic surgeries he performed. After Macchiarini was given a suspended sentence, essentially walking free, prosecutors in the case announced that they would appeal the ruling. "In all cases, the interventions were contrary to science and best practice. It seems clear to me that these have been completely unlawful human experiments and the penalty should be a long prison sentence, given the nature of the crime and the high penal value,” they said in a statement, per the Associated Press.
On June 21, 2023, Stockholm’s Court of Appeal found that Macchiarini’s surgeries on three of his patients who later died amounted to serious bodily assault, and sentenced him to two and a half years in prison. He is currently serving that sentence.
