Check out this important post by Buddhini Samarasinghe, especially if you’re in the UK

Check out this important post by Buddhini Samarasinghe, especially if you’re in the UK

Originally shared by Buddhini Samarasinghe

Scientists behaving badly

Somewhat long ranty post here, so brace yourself. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Stem cells and regenerative medicine have come a long way in the past few decades but we are nowhere near being able to do synthetic organ transplants. If you remember a breathless headline stating that from a few years ago, rest assured that it was a fraud, and many of the patients sadly died from the procedure.

I find stories like this infuriating and frustrating. On the one hand, I don’t have any power here; I am not a prestigious academic with the ability to make or even influence funding decisions, and neither am I a science journalist with a lot of clout. But when scientists do fraudulent shit like this, and worse, it ends up killing people, it’s just…argh. If there is a hell, there is a special place in it for fuckwits like Paolo Macchiarini.

This story came out about a year ago, and many prominent heads at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden rolled as a result. But that was after a documentary-maker exposed this shit show for what it was. Before that? The Karolinska Institute was sooo attached to their superstar surgeon that they simply defended him whenever anyone asked too many questions.

“In the picture that emerges from these reports, we see a doctor persisting with a technique that showed few signs of working and able to take extraordinary risks with his patients, and a medical institution so attached to their star doctor that they ignore mounting evidence of his poor judgement”

I think this is the part that irks me the most. I get that there are shitty individuals in every field, people who have no conscience and are willing to take shortcuts so they can rise to the top. But science is supposed to be self-correcting, and scientists are supposed to be objective; when these biases and flaws, in a field that I love, are made so blatantly obvious, it kinda makes me die a little inside. I wasn’t even sure if I should write about this but then realised how many people didn’t know about Paolo Macchiarini’s shoddy science, so I figured I should.

More links: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37311038

https://forbetterscience.com/2016/02/21/macchiarini-and-karolinska-the-biomedical-ethics-meltdown/

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/celebrity-surgeon-nbc-news-producer-scam

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37311038