What happened to Paolo Macchiarini after accusations went public?

Alexander, who at the time was still planning to marry him, later remembered how stressed Macchiarini was in the weeks leading up to the 2014 New York Times report about the Karolinska investigation. "He had been talking to me for some time about how there were people that were against him, and his 'enemies,'" she told 20/20 in 2021.

He denied all of the accusations against him, Alexander said, and she stayed in his corner until the whole pope debacle.

But after they broke up in 2015, things unraveled quickly.

"It turned out that Macchiarini had always liked journalists and had often invited TV teams to his surgeries," documentarian Bosse Lindquist, who followed the doctor around for months while shooting a series for Swedish public television, told BBC News in 2016.

Macchiarini admitted to Lindquist that he had never tested the viability of the plastic tracheae before implanting them in humans (animal testing remains a standard step in medical research). The surgeon maintained that his cases were too urgent, that there wasn't time to go through all the red tape. 

Lindquist's docuseries, eerily titled The Experiments, premiered on Sweden's SVT in January 2016. Within months, per the BBC, Macchiarini's contract with the Karolinska Institute was terminated, the vice-chancellor of the organization and the dean of research resigned, and any remaining KI board members were ousted.

In March 2016, Macchiarini indicated he wouldn't take his firing lying down, telling Nature, "I have instructed lawyers and will be taking immediate steps to restore my reputation."

"It is very strange that it should take a TV program to make this public," Bo Risberg, professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Gothenberg and a former chairman of the Swedish Ethics Council, said in response to The Experiments. "Everything was swept under the carpet." Failing to do pre-clinic work with animals, Risberg added, was "the worst crime you can commit."