Two Nobel judges to step down over ethics scandal
September 07, 2016  01:49
Two members of the assembly that awards the Nobel prize for medicine are to quit for failing to heed warnings about a major ethics scandal, the panel said today.

The secretary of the Nobel Assembly, Thomas Perlmann, said Harriet Wallberg and Anders Hamsten were being asked to step down.

"The crisis of trust is such... that we are going to ask them to leave the Nobel Assembly," he told the Swedish news agency TT. 

The pair are former rectors of the Karolinska Institute (KI), Sweden's top medical university, where the scandal coincided with their spells in office. 

The affair centres on Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who in 2011 soared to fame for inserting the first synthetic trachea, or windpipe. 

It was a plastic structure seeded with the patient's own stem cells, immature cells that grow into specialised cells of the body's organs. Hired as a visiting professor at Karolinska in 2010, Macchiarini performed three of these operations in Stockholm and five others around the world.

His work was initially hailed as a game-changer for transplant medicine. But two patients died and a third was left severely ill. 
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