1/20 Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary 
 
 2/20 A 3D reconstruction of an African grey parrot post euthanasia Included in Wellcome Image Awards, this 3D image of an African grey parrot shows the highly intricate system of blood vessels. Scott Birch. Wellcome Images 
 
 3/20 Baby Hawaiian bobtail squid Another Wellcome Images Award winner, this time of baby Hawaiian bobtail squid. The black ink sac and light organ in the centre of the squid’s mantle cavity can be clearly seen. Macroscopic Solutions. Wellcome Images 
 
 4/20 Skeletons of 5,000-year-old Chinese ‘giants’ discovered by archaeologists The people are thought to have been unusually tall and strong. The tallest of the skeletons uncovered measured at 1.9m YouTube 
 
 5/20 Nasa discovers 75,000 mile-wide hole in the Sun Sunspots are caused by interactions with the Sun’s magnetic field and are cooler areas on the star’s surface. Nasa 
 
 6/20 View(active tab) Apple News Breaking news email Edit Revisions Workflow Clear Cache NewsScience 132 million-year-old dinosaur fossil found at factory in Surrey Paleontologists Sarah Moore and Jamie Jordan believe they have discovered a Iguanodon dinosaur, a herbivore that was around three metres tall and 10 metres long Cambridge Photographers/Wienerberger 
 
 7/20 Discovering life on Mars is less likely as researchers find toxic chemicals on its surface The Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars Getty Images 
 
 8/20 The Grand Prismatic Spring, the largest in the United States and third largest in the world, is seen in Yellowstone National Park. The park is famous for its geothermal activity – which includes its spectacular, flowing springs as well as the famous "Old Faithful" geyser that sprays water out every hour or so. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart 
 
 9/20 An iris clip fitted onto the eye This images is apart of the Wellcome Images Awards and shows how an artificial intraocular lens is fitted onto the eye. Used for conditions such as myopia and cataracts. Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT. Wellcome Images 
 
 10/20 The Syrian civil war has caused the first ever withdrawal from the 'doomsday bank' Researchers in the Middle East have asked for seeds including those of wheat, barley and grasses, all of which are chosen because especially resistant to dry conditions. It is the first withdrawal from the bank, which was built in 2008. Those researchers would normally request the seeds from a bank in Aleppo. But that centre has been damaged by the war — while some of its functions continue, and its cold storage still works, it has been unable to provide the seeds that are needed by the rest of the Middle East, as it once did. 
 
 11/20 Scientists find exactly what human corpses smell like New research has become the first to isolate the particular scent of human death, describing the various chemicals that are emitted by corpses in an attempt to help find them in the future. The researchers hope that the findings are the first step towards working on a synthetic smell that could train cadaver dogs to be able to more accurately find human bodies, or to eventually developing electronic devices that can look for the scent themselves. 
 
 12/20 Black hole captured eating a star then vomiting it back out Astronomers have captured a black hole eating a star and then sicking a bit of it back up for the first time ever. The scientists tracked a star about as big as our sun as it was pulled from its normal path and into that of a supermassive black hole before being eaten up. They then saw a high-speed flare get thrust out, escaping from the rim of the black hole. Scientists have seen black holes killing and swallowing stars. And the jets have been seen before.But a new study shows the first time that they have captured the hot flare that comes out just afterwards. And the flare and then swallowed star have not been linked together before 
 
 13/20 Dog-sized horned dinosaur fossil found shows east-west evolutionary divide in North America A British scientist has uncovered the fossil of a dog-sized horned dinosaur that roamed eastern North America up to 100 million years ago. The fragment of jaw bone provides evidence of an east-west divide in the evolution of dinosaurs on the North American continent. During the Late Cretaceous period, 66 to 100 million years ago, the land mass was split into two continents by a shallow sea. This sea, the Western Interior Seaway, ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. Dinosaurs living in the western continent, called Laramidia, were similar to those found in Asia 
 
 14/20 'Male and female brains' aren't real Brains cannot be categorised into female and male, according to the first study to look at sex differences in the whole brain. Specific parts of the brain do show sex differences, but individual brains rarely have all “male” traits or all “female” traits. Some characteristics are more common in women, while some are more common in men, and some are common in both men and women, according to the study 
 
 15/20 Life on Earth appeared hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought Life may have come to earth 4.1 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than we knew. The discovery, made using graphite that was trapped in ancient crystals, could mean that life began "almost instantaneously" after the Earth was formed. The researchers behind it have described the discovery as “a potentially transformational scientific advance”. Previously, life on Earth was understood to have begun when the inner solar system was hit by a massive bombardment from space, which also formed the moon's craters 
 
 16/20 Nasa confirms Mars water discovery Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae — or dark patches — on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. 
 
 17/20 Earth could be at risk of meteor impacts Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned. Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way. But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower. Showers of meteors periodically pass through the area where the Earth is, as gravitational disturbances upset the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy objects on the edge of the solar system. They happen on a 26-million year cycle, scientists have said, which coincide with mass extinctions over the last 260-million years 
 
 18/20 Genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time. The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review. The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project. Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s. Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur 
 
 19/20 Researchers discover 'lost world' of arctic dinosaurs Scientists say that the new dinosaur, known as Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, “challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur’s physiology”. Florida State University professor of biological science Greg Erickson said: “It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here?” ||||| STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The Swedish government has dismissed the board of the Karolinska Institute after an investigation showed it was negligent when hiring surgeon Paolo Macchiarini and letting him operate on patients. 
 
 The medical scandal that includes numerous accusations of scientific fraud and the death of patients is a severe blow to the reputation of the institution that awards the Nobel Prize for Medicine. 
 
 The hiring of Italian surgeon Macchiarini had already led to the resignation of the secretary of the Nobel Committee at the Institute as well as the then chancellor in February and to the Institute chairman last week. 
 
 Macchiarini was fired in March when Karolinska said he had supplied false information on his resume and was guilty of scientific negligence after two of his patients died. 
 
 Swedish prosecutors are investigating Macchiarini on suspicion of gross criminal negligence leading to another person’s death. He has denied any wrongdoing. 
 
 “Scandal is the right word,” Minister for Higher Education and Research Helene Hellmark Knutsson told a news conference. 
 
 “People have been harmed because of the acting of the Karolinska Institute and also the Karolinska University Hospital,” she said. 
 
 The government announced the firings after an external investigation commissioned by the Institute was presented on Monday. The investigator said that the management had showed “a stunning indifference” toward a vast amount of very negative references when hiring Macchiarini. 
 
 Hellmark Knutsson said the investigation showed that the Institute had broken laws and regulations and that it had showed disrespect toward laws, ethics and morale. 
 
 She said that as soon as a new board had been recruited, the board members that had not already quit after the Macchiarini scandal would be replaced. 
 
 The country’s University Chancellor Harriet Wallberg, who was heading the Karolinska Institute when Macchiarini was hired, would also have to leave her position, Hellmark Knutsson said. 
 
 Bo Risberg, former head of the ethics committee at Karolinska, has called for the Nobel Prize for Medecine to be put on ice for two years and for prize money to be used to compensate the relatives of the patients Macchiarini operated on. 
 
 Macchiarini was employed as a researcher into stem cell biology at the Karolinska Institute and consultant at Karolinska University Hospital in 2010. 
 
 Another investigation that was presented last week centered on three operations conducted at the Karolinska University Hospital between 2011 and 2012 in which Macchiarini transplanted synthetic tracheas coated with stem cells into patients. 
 
 That investigation showed he performed the operations before sufficient study had been done on the procedure and that the operations could not be justified on the grounds of being life-saving. 
 
 Two of the patients have since died while the third remains hospitalized. ||||| 
 
 Paolo Macchiarini speaks at a news conference in Florence in July 2010. (Lorenzo Galassi/AP) 
 
 Two high profile members of the Nobel Assembly were asked to resign as part of the fallout from the scientific scandal centered on Paolo Macchiarini — a scandal that left two people dead and tarnished the reputation of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. 
 
 Macchiarini was the first surgeon to perform a transplant of a biosynthetic trachea, but two of three patients to receive such a transplant have died. Swedish prosecutors are investigating Macchiarini on potential charges of involuntary manslaughter — charges which the surgeon has previously disputed, according to the Associated Press. 
 
 On Tuesday, the Nobel Assembly, which is in charge of choosing the recipient of the institution’s prize for physiology or medicine, asked Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson and Anders Hamsten, two of its 50 judges, to resign. Both are former vice chancellors of the Karolinska Institute, the Swedish medical university associated with the Karolinska University Hospital that employed Macchiarini. 
 
 In addition, Swedish Minister of Higher Education and Research Helene Hellmark Knutsson said publicly that she has dismissed Wallberg-Henriksson from her position as Sweden’s chancellor of all public universities. 
 
 Knutsson has also called for all Karolinska Institute board members who were active while Macchiarini was employed by the institution to step down. Any who choose not to resign will be replaced, Reuters reported. 
 
 The Karolinska Institute fired Macchiarini in March. 
 
 This week’s firings came after a pair of reports criticizing both Macchiarini and the institute were made public. 
 
 “Scandal is the right word,” Knutsson told the BBC. “People have been harmed because of the actions of the Karolinska Institute and also the Karolinska University Hospital.” 
 
 When Macchiarini first came to the institute, he was praised by the media as a super-scientist, a sort of wunderkind. 
 
 Macchiarini captured headlines in 2011, a year after he had been recruited by the institute, for his work in regenerative medicine. That year he implanted a “bioartificial” trachea, one made from plastic and the patient’s own stem cells, into a man named Andemariam Beyene. 
 
 It seemed groundbreaking, at the time. 
 
 “I almost refused,” Beyene told the New York Times. It had only been done in pigs. But [Macchiarini] convinced me in a very scientific way.” 
 
 Thomson Reuters BioWorld likened his work to “science fiction” and the New York Times called it “a first.” 
 
 But in January 2014, as the Iceland Review noted, the trachea Macchiarini had implanted became loose, killing Beyene. 
 
 He wasn’t the only patient of Macchiarini to die. 
 
 Including Beyene’s, Macchiarini performed three of these transplant surgeries at Karolinska University Hospital. 
 
 Two of the three died, and one has been in intensive care since the surgery in 2012, Science reported. 
 
 Macchiarini made headlines again in 2015 when an independent review found that he overstated his work — in shocking ways. 
 
 As The Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan wrote at the time: 
 
 The investigator who examined his studies said that Macchiarini was guilty of scientific misconduct by omitting or fabricating information about his patients’ postoperative status to make the procedure seem more successful than it really was. 
 
 Macchiarini’s reported misdeeds were later found to run even deeper, when a report last week found that only one of the three patients signed a consent form. All were capable of doing so. 
 
 Even that one signed form “would not have been approved” since the patient wasn’t afforded the option of discussing the procedure with an independent medical expert, the report said. 
 
 The report pointed out that a different synthetic material was used in each transplant, which hinted at a lack of research into which one actually worked and suggested an unreadiness for usage in human beings. 
 
 “Too little was known about the material in order for it to be able to begin to be used in patients,” it stated. 
 
 [How scientists built the world’s first lab-grown limbs] 
 
 Finally, it stated that growth-stimulating drugs were used in at least two of the surgeries without the necessary permit from the Swedish Medical Products Agency. 
 
 Another report, this one led by former president of Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court Sten Heckscher and released Monday, was also highly critical of the renowned institution itself, claiming that Karolinska “has a certain responsibility for the transplantation.” 
 
 The English version of the report stated: 
 
 There are many instances of KI employees being involved in the discussions preceding and following up surgery. KI has also, in several contexts, cited the transplantations as part of its own activities. For example, they have been quoted as research successes in KI’s evaluations of how research funding has been utilized. 
 
 This report opined that KI never should have hired Macchiarini in the first place, considering the references the institution received concerning the surgeon. 
 
 “KI received remarkably negative references, including information that Macchiarini had been blocked from a professorship in Italy, that there were doubts surrounding his research and that his CV contained falsehoods,” it stated. 
 
 Lastly, the report found the hospital extended Macchiarini’s contract twice — once in 2013 and one in 2015 — with “no real evaluation or assessment of Macchiarini’s work.” 
 
 “Instead, the department management asked Macchiarini to describe his work himself,” it stated. The description was translated and used in the proposal to extend his contract that was submitted to the Recruitment Committee.” 
 
 Bo Risberg, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told Science that asking Hamsten and Wallberg-Henriksson to resign from the Nobel Assembly was the proper decision. 
 
 “The Nobel Prize and the Karolinska are intimately related, particularly to observers outside Sweden,” Risberg said, calling the situation “the biggest scandal we have ever had in Swedish medicine.” 
 
 Currently, prosecutors are investigating Macchiarini on potential charges of involuntary manslaughter relating to the two patients who died after receiving the transplants. 
 
 Macchiarini has not commented on the new reports, but has previously disputed all charges, according to the Associated Press. 
 
 More from Morning Mix 
 
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 ‘In reference to the personalized license plate KUMQUAT ….’ ||||| The panel that hands out the Nobel Prize for Medicine has demanded the resignation of two of its judges for allegedly mishandling a scandal over a disgraced Italian surgeon who specialised in stem cell therapy. 
 
 Anders Hamsten and Harriet Wallberg have been asked to resign for failing to heed warnings in their roles at Sweden's Karolinksa Institute of misconduct by Dr Paolo Macchiarini, who in the past has falsely claimed to be Pope Francis’s personal doctor. 
 
 Earlier this year, the 57-year-old surgeon, once regarded as a brilliant pioneer in the field of windpipe transplants, was fired from his job at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm – home of the Nobel Prize for Medicine - after being accused of negligence, scientific fraud and falsifying his CV. 
 
 He is being investigated by prosecutors for involuntary manslaughter and gross criminal negligence in connection with two patients who died. 
 
 The scandal has already cost Mr Hamsten his job as vice-chancellor of the prestigious Karolinska Insitute. Ms Wallberg, who headed the institute when Macchiarini was hired, was fired from her current job as head of the Swedish Higher Education Authority on Monday. 
 
 They will have to resign from the 50-member panel before it awards the next Nobel Prize for Medicine in October. 
 
 Dr Macchiarini was employed as a researcher into stem cell biology at the Karolinska Institute and a consultant at Karolinska University Hospital in 2010. 
 
 But he lost his job in March after a documentary by Swedish broadcaster SVT alleged that he had used his patients as guinea pigs for untested techniques that involved the transplant of tracheas coated with stem cells. Out of eight patients who received the synthetic windpipe transplants, six died. 
 
 A spokesman for the institute said at the time: “He has acted in a way that has had very tragic consequences for the people affected and their families.” 
 
 Dr Macchiarini denies any wrongdoing. In March he said he “did not accept of the findings” of the institute’s disciplinary board and vowed to “take immediate steps to restore my reputation.” 
 
 "Scandal is the right word," said Helene Hellmark Knutsson, the higher education minister. "People have been harmed because of the actions of the Karolinska Institute and also the Karolinska University Hospital." 
 
 Bo Risberg, a former head of the ethics committee at the institute, has called for the Nobel Prize for Medicine to be shelved for the next two years and for the prize money to be used to compensate the relatives of the patients that Dr Macchiarini operated on. ||||| Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016. These files are currently not publicly accessible. Properties of this collection. It has been several years since the last time we did this. For this collection, several things were done: 1. Turned off duplicate detection. This collection will be complete, as there is a good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random other collections, is a complex problem. 2. For the first time, did all the different wikis. The original runs were just against the enwiki. This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections. ||||| “B—P 4 EVER” Then NBC television producer Benita Alexander and Dr. Paolo Macchiarini glide toward the Doge’s Palace, on the left, and the Bridge of Sighs (visible beyond the pedestrian walkway), Venice, 2013. They met during the making of an NBC News special about the doctor’s work. 
 
 He’s the doctor who does the seemingly impossible, going where no other has yet dared. 
 
 —Meredith Vieira I. A Most Interesting Man The first meeting between Benita Alexander, an award-winning producer for NBC News, and Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, the famous transplant surgeon, took place at the bar at Boston’s Mandarin Oriental hotel. It was February 2013, shortly before Macchiarini would have his initial interview with Meredith Vieira for a two-hour NBC special called A Leap of Faith. Macchiarini, 57, is a magnet for superlatives. He is commonly referred to as “world-renowned” and a “super-surgeon.” He is credited with medical miracles, including the world’s first synthetic organ transplant, which involved fashioning a trachea, or windpipe, out of plastic and then coating it with a patient’s own stem cells. That feat, in 2011, appeared to solve two of medicine’s more intractable problems—organ rejection and the lack of donor organs—and brought with it major media exposure for Macchiarini and his employer, Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, home of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Macchiarini was now planning another first: a synthetic-trachea transplant on a child, a two-year-old Korean-Canadian girl named Hannah Warren, who had spent her entire life in a Seoul hospital. Macchiarini had come to Vieira’s attention in September 2012, when she read a front-page New York Times story about the doctor. She turned to Alexander, one of her most seasoned and levelheaded producers, to look into a regenerative-medicine story for television. With blue eyes and raven hair, Alexander seems younger than her 49 years. Though she brims with confidence, friends say she bears the scars of a turbulent childhood in Huntington Woods, Michigan. In her own telling, just shy of her 16th birthday, she returned home from a sleepover to discover that her mother had left the family. Two years later, her father, who by then had married a neighbor, asked her to pack up and leave. Alexander overcame her upbringing and in 1987 graduated magna cum laude from Wayne State University with a degree in journalism. She spent the early 1990s working at a string of local television stations and briefly taught journalism at her alma mater. After she met and married fellow reporter John Noel, the two moved to New York City, where she joined NBC’s Dateline. In 2003, Alexander gave birth to a daughter, Jessina. Alexander and Noel divorced in 2009, and in 2012 she married a ballroom dance instructor named Edson Jeune. Over the years, Alexander has worked with NBC’s top talent—Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer, and Ann Curry, as well as with Vieira—and earned many accolades, including two Emmys as well as the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award. Now Alexander sat across from Macchiarini at Bar Boulud, in the Mandarin Oriental. At the time, Alexander’s first husband, Noel, was hospitalized with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and she would in time begin sharing details about his condition—as well as about her dissatisfaction with her second marriage. “Having worked with so many patients who are terminally ill, Paolo was immensely helpful as far as helping me navigate my complicated emotions,” she explained when I spoke with her this fall. He also suggested ways to talk about the matter with her daughter. “He was an amazing friend to me during that time, and a solid, reliable pillar of strength. He spent hours listening to me talk about it all and offering gentle advice.” (Disclosure: I worked as a producer at NBC News from 2004 to 2009. I did not meet Alexander until I contacted her in 2015.) Photograph by Gina LeVay. When Alexander and Macchiarini found themselves together in Illinois for a period of weeks in the spring of 2013—brought there by the NBC special—they met frequently for quiet dinners. The trachea transplant on Hannah Warren, the Korean-Canadian girl, was being performed at Children’s Hospital of Illinois, in Peoria, and the procedure was fraught with risks, not least because Macchiarini’s technique was still a work in progress even for adults. (Christopher Lyles, an American who became the second person to receive an artificial trachea, died less than four months after his surgery at Karolinska.) “He’s a brilliant scientist and a great technical surgeon,” said Dr. Richard Pearl, who operated alongside Macchiarini in Illinois. Like others, Pearl described his Italian colleague as a Renaissance man, fluent in half a dozen languages. Another person, who would get to know him through Alexander, compared Macchiarini to “the Most Interesting Man in the World,” the character made famous in Dos Equis beer commercials. In Peoria, Macchiarini’s medical magic appeared to have its limitations. Hannah Warren died from post-surgical complications less than three months after the transplant. Her anatomy “was much more challenging than we realized,” Pearl recounted. “Scientifically, the operation itself worked. It was just a shame what happened. When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t have a textbook. It was the hardest operation I’ve ever scrubbed on.” II. Crossing the Line 
 
 The personal relationship between Alexander and Macchiarini continued to blossom. In June 2013, they flew to Venice for what Alexander called “an incredibly romantic weekend.” Macchiarini bought her red roses and Venetian-glass earrings and took her on a gondola ride under the Bridge of Sighs. Like a pair of teenagers, they attached love locks to the Ponte dell’Accademia bridge, one of them bearing the inscription “B—P 23/6/13, 4 Ever.” Alexander told me that, “when he took me to Venice, we were still shooting the story … He always paid for everything … gifts, expensive dinners, flowers—the works. When it came to money, he was incredibly generous.” It is a bedrock principle at NBC and every other news organization that journalists must avoid conflicts of interest, real or apparent. Alexander was not oblivious to this. “I knew that I was crossing the line in the sense that it’s a basic and well-understood rule of journalism that you don’t become involved with one of the subjects of your story, because your objectivity could clearly become compromised,” she told me. “I never once thought about him paying for the trip as him ‘buying’ me in some fashion, or potentially using money to influence me, because, from my perspective anyway … that just wasn’t the case. We were just crazy about each other, and I was falling in love.” While Alexander insists that she tried to put the relationship on hold after Venice, she flew to see Macchiarini in Stockholm two weeks later. “Our nights were always spent together, and always romantic in one way or another,” she said. Macchiarini was in Stockholm to attend to Yesim Cetir, a 25-year-old Turkish woman whose artificial trachea had failed. As Swedish television later reported, “It has taken nearly 100 surgeries to support the cell tissue around the airpipes. Her breathing is bad, and to avoid suffocation, her respiratory tract must be cleansed from mucus every fourth hour. She has now been lying in the hospital for nearly 1,000 days.” NBC’s special would come to include skeptical commentary from Dr. Joseph Vacanti, who questioned the sufficiency of Macchiarini’s research, but Cetir’s post-operative complications were not mentioned. By October 2013, when Macchiarini and Alexander flew to Europe for another romantic getaway, she had in her own mind reconciled her personal and professional behavior. “The story was basically done by the time we went to London. It was all little tweaking after that, nothing significant, and so I totally separated Paolo and work in my head,” she explained. “I was in love and because I had made a very personal decision to take a leap of faith for love, I never looked back.” Should she have informed her friend and mentor, Meredith Vieira? “I knew I was crossing the line at work,” Alexander said, “and I made a very conscious decision not to tell anybody else at work what I was doing.” III. Breakthrough in Spain 
 
 Paolo Macchiarini was born in Switzerland to Italian parents and has spoken of having had a difficult childhood in Basel, where by his own account he felt like a perpetual outsider in school. He attended the University of Pisa, where he would earn a medical degree with a specialization in surgery. During his studies, Alexander recalled Macchiarini telling her, he had received a call from his father, who complained of feeling unwell. The aspiring doctor examined his father but could find nothing wrong and returned to the university. His father died shortly thereafter. It was a moment, Alexander said, that has forever haunted him. In 1986, Macchiarini started a family of his own, marrying an Italian woman, Emanuela Pecchia, with whom he had a daughter and a son. From the collection of Benita Alexander. Over time, Macchiarini developed a certain skepticism about his homeland. “After I had graduated and specialised in thoracic surgery,” he was quoted saying in The Irish Times, in 2008, “I wanted to enter university to continue my studies in that field. I was blocked, I was told not to apply for the job because the result, even before the interviews, had already been decided. There were the usual raccomandati [those with pull] in the queue in front of me.” The Italian system, he told the British medical journal The Lancet in 2012, “favours people who are linked to the politics or are sons of sons but not the merits. I knew that in other countries this was not the fact. So I left.” In 1990 he traded Italy for America, where, according to his curriculum vitae, he did a fellowship in thoracic surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Macchiarini’s peripatetic studies continued in Besançon, France, where, according to his C.V., he earned a master’s of science and a Ph.D. in organ and tissue transplantation. According to another C.V., he earned a master’s in biostatistics in Alabama and a Ph.D. in life and health science in Besançon. All told, he had a distinguished medical pedigree. He then plunged headlong into academia, starting in France, where according to his C.V.’s he joined the University of Paris—Sud with an “accreditation to Full Professor.” A full professor in Europe is comparable to what Americans call a tenured professor, meaning the individual in question has obtained the highest academic rank at a given institution and has been accorded the job protection and other benefits that go with it. But as Macchiarini told The Lancet in 2012, he was restless: “I think if you stay in a single place for your entire life you restrict your capacity…. In 10 years it came to a point where I was adult, and I needed to go away to express my creativity.” So in 2000 or 2001—depending on which C.V. one consults—he became a full professor at Hannover Medical School, in Germany. Even Germany seemed too confining for Macchiarini, and he moved to Spain, where in 2005, according to one C.V., he became a professore ordinario, a full professor, and where he would continue to maintain a residence. Macchiarini’s wide-ranging academic appointments seemed to prepare him well for his star turn. In June 2008, he performed a trachea transplant using a donor organ seeded with stem cells. The operation in Barcelona on a 30-year-old mother of two, Claudia Lorena Castillo Sanchez, was heralded in the press as the “dawn of the stem-cell revolution.” By replacing cadaverous cells with autologous stem cells (that is, those harvested from the patient’s bone marrow), the technique held out the promise of minimizing organ rejection and reliance on powerful immunosuppressive drugs. Macchiarini himself called the operation “a major achievement in the history of medicine.” From the collection of Benita Alexander. The breakthrough in Spain caught the eye of officials back in Italy, who, concerned that the country was experiencing a brain drain, sought his return. A headline in La Repubblica summarized the turn of events neatly: ROSSI PHONES MACCHIARINI: “COME AND OPERATE WITH US”—referring to Enrico Rossi, then Tuscany’s top health official, who would later become the region’s president. Rossi lured Macchiarini back with a large and prestigious package: a state-sponsored laboratory, the chance to showcase his innovative surgical techniques at Florence’s Careggi Hospital, and a full professorship at the university to which it is connected. Italian law, however, required proof of equivalency: in order to appoint a full professor without an open competition, the university had to show that the candidate had held an equivalent post—that is, a full professorship—at a comparable institution, whether in Italy or abroad. Given his fame, his political connections, and his ample academic credentials, the star surgeon was regarded as a shoo-in, and in late 2009, Dr. Gian Franco Gensini, the dean of the faculty of medicine, assembled a special commission to, in the words of one participant, “rubber-stamp” Macchiarini’s appointment. But in the end, Macchiarini never got the full professorship. He operated at Careggi for a few years and then moved on to posts at the Karolinska Institute and Kuban State Medical University in Russia. IV. Paolo, Putin, and the Pope 
 
 Macchiarini proposed to Benita Alexander on Christmas Day 2013, Alexander said. In the months leading up to the airing of A Leap of Faith, in June 2014, Macchiarini and Alexander went on trips to the Bahamas, Turkey, Mexico, Greece, and Italy. They went on shopping sprees and ate their way through Michelin-starred restaurants. Macchiarini even took Alexander and her daughter to meet his mother at her home, in Lucca. “She cooked homemade gnocchi,” Alexander recalled. Macchiarini’s mother shared pictures from the family photo album while her son translated. Emanuela Pecchia, the woman whom Macchiarini had married years earlier, lived only a short distance away. When Macchiarini informed Alexander, during a dinner cruise later that summer, that his divorce had finally come through, she recounted, he gave her an engagement ring. Macchiarini could be secretive at times. After his Christmas proposal, he told Alexander that he could not stick around for New Year’s because he was on call for what, she said, he termed an “emergency V.I.P. surgery.” When she pressed him for details, he swore her to silence before telling her, as she recalled, that he was part of a “highly classified group of doctors from around the world who cater to the world’s V.I.P.’s.” She said Macchiarini over time revealed that he had operated on Bill and Hillary Clinton, Emperor Akihito of Japan, and President Obama. People who spent time with the couple said they heard Macchiarini talk about his high-level connections. An NBC colleague, Alisha Cowan-Vieira (no relation to Meredith Vieira), recalled, “I saw a lot of text messages between Benita and Paolo, and she would say, ‘OMG, look what he just told me.’ The texts would say, ‘I just left a meeting with PF [Pope Francis]’ or with Bill Clinton or the Obamas.” Shortly after NBC aired A Leap of Faith, Alexander met Meredith Vieira for lunch at the Modern, an airy restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art. In the dining room overlooking the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, with its works by Miró, Matisse, and Picasso, Alexander said, she told her boss for the first time about her relationship with Paolo and that it had begun while the story was still in production. She said that, while she preferred to keep their conversation private, Vieira was taken aback. “I perfectly understand her reaction,” Alexander said. “There’s no two ways about it. I crossed the line.” A source close to Vieira confirmed that Alexander disclosed the relationship at this lunch but, by this account, had assured Vieira that it began only after production wrapped. In the months that followed, the doctor and his fiancée began planning their wedding in earnest. They set a date for July 11, 2015, in Rome. But their desire to marry in the Catholic Church was complicated by the fact that she is Episcopalian and divorced. Divorce would have been an issue for Macchiarini as well. However, Alexander said, Macchiarini insisted that he would fix things by visiting his friend and patient in the Vatican. In October 2014, Alexander recalled, Macchiarini told her that he had met with Pope Francis for four hours and that the Pontiff consented to the couple’s marriage and, in yet another sign of his progressive tenure, vowed to officiate. Alexander said Macchiarini referred to himself as Pope Francis’s “personal doctor” and maintained that in subsequent meetings his patient offered to host the wedding at his summer residence, the Apostolic Palace of Castel Gandolfo. A recommendation letter written by Dr. Mark Holterman—who, along with Dr. Pearl, operated on Hannah Warren in Peoria—suggests that Macchiarini’s Vatican connections were well known: When Pope John Paul II was dying and having trouble breathing from advanced Parkinson’s Disease, Professor Macchiarini was called in to provide an urgent consultation for the pontiff. The decision to not perform an urgent tracheostomy was jointly made between the doctor and his Holy patient. When Professor Macchiarini renders an opinion on all things involving the diseased airway, people listen. He remains among the world’s elite airway surgeons. Over lunch in New York at the restaurant Print, in Hell’s Kitchen, on February 13, 2015, Macchiarini spoke in depth about the wedding plans with Matthew Christopher, a designer who has dressed everyone from Broadway and television star Kristin Chenoweth to World Cup darling Carli Lloyd. He was already hard at work on Benita Alexander’s elaborate wedding gown and three additional dresses for the various functions that were planned. Macchiarini “was totally polished. Very much Mr. Big,” Christopher recalled, referring to the larger-than-life Sex and the City character. According to David Marchi, Christopher’s husband and P.R. chief, who was also at the lunch, “He told us the wedding would take place at the Pope’s summer residence and because of the enormous security—with the Pope and all these heads of state—that the planning between Matthew and Benita had to be precise. The Pope was going to let Benita use his special carriage. We discussed how to get Benita’s dress into this carriage with enough time so that Matthew can get her in, run to the church, and get in the one door before things were locked for security.” 
 
 Among the V.I.P.’s who Macchiarini said were planning to attend the wedding were Russia’s Vladimir Putin, President and Mrs. Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. Macchiarini also told people that Andrea Bocelli would sing during the service. As for food, Macchiarini was apparently not sparing any expense: Florence’s Enoteca Pinchiorri, with its three Michelin stars, was catering the affair. Toward the end of their February lunch, Macchiarini asked Alexander to leave the table so he could speak privately with Christopher and Marchi. In a hushed tone, the doctor told them that Pope Francis wanted them to participate more fully in the wedding ceremony. “I almost fell off my chair,” recounted Marchi, whose Catholic parents came to the U.S. from Italy. “Growing up, I was always looking for this transformative moment. So when we were told we would take confession and Communion from the Pope as two gay married men, that was it. For me it was almost as if God said, ‘You’ve been waiting for this moment—here it is.’ It was very emotional. Matthew and I started crying.” Alexander and Macchiarini returned from the lunch to her apartment in Brooklyn to find that the wedding invitations had arrived. Sheathed in lambskin and engraved with the initials B&P, the invitations were addressed to, among others, the Obamas, the Clintons, the Putins, the Sarkozys, Andrea Bocelli, Kofi Annan, Russell Crowe, Elton John, John Legend, Kenny Rogers, Meredith Vieira, and His Holiness Pope Francis. By this time, Alexander had met with David Corvo, who as NBC’s senior executive producer for prime-time news was ultimately responsible for A Leap of Faith. Over lunch at Michael’s, Alexander, by her own account, revealed that she and Macchiarini had been together while the story was in production. Alexander recalled that she gave Corvo details about the wedding, including the Pope’s participation. He sent her an e-mail a few weeks later. “Congrats that this is all coming together,” he wrote. “With invitations going out, I need to tell [NBC News president] Deborah Turness. Is everything remaining confidential? She’ll of course want to discuss coverage soonest. (And exclusivity, as you would expect.) Again, congrats.” Alexander says that she and Corvo met again on March 16 and that they discussed how NBC could best cover the wedding. A source close to Corvo confirmed that Alexander told him about the relationship during the lunch at Michael’s but, according to the source, had assured Corvo that it had begun only after the reporting and production were finished. The source added that Corvo was always skeptical about the Pope’s involvement, made no plans to cover the wedding, and did not tell Deborah Turness about the possibility. By May, when according to Alexander her superiors were aware that she, as the producer of A Leap of Faith, had been and continued to be romantically involved with the story’s subject, NBC had submitted the program for an Emmy Award. Sources close to NBC say that Vieira and Corvo were not aware of how early the relationship began until approached by Vanity Fair. NBC News says that, if any new information reported in this story is relevant to its production of A Leap of Faith, it will update it accordingly online, in keeping with its standards practices. In anticipation of a move to Europe, Alexander on May 13 left her job at NBC and notified her daughter’s school that she would not be coming back. She received a glowing video tribute from Vieira: I first met Benita nine years ago. We were asked to cover a story—a heartbreaking story—about a beautiful high-school student who had lost her life in Colorado. And you learn a lot about someone when you’re in the trenches with them doing that kind of story. I learned that Benita is a fabulous producer. I learned that she is a brilliant writer. But most importantly, I learned that she is an incredibly sensitive and wonderful human being who understands others and wants to connect with them in a very deep and profound way. And ever since that story, every time I was asked, “Is there a particular producer you want?,” I would say, “Please, please let me work with Benita.” I love her tremendously. Not just as a professional but also as a dear friend. And anybody given the opportunity to work with her would be crazy to say no. Run to Benita. Don’t walk. Run to Benita. I wish her the best and I know she that she will do extremely well in her new life in Barcelona. From the collection of Benita Alexander. V. The Reckoning 
 
 The very next day, May 14, Alexander received an e-mail from a friend. The subject line read simply: “The Pope.” It included a link to an article detailing Vatican plans for Pope Francis to visit South America in July—at the very time when he was supposed to be officiating at her wedding. In that instant, the bottom fell out. A few weeks later, Alexander would send an e-mail to invited guests in 17 countries, canceling the wedding. Many had already purchased flights, booked hotels, and bought new clothes for what everyone expected to be a wedding for the ages. Alexander recalled that Macchiarini tried to blame the scheduling mix-up on Vatican politics and claimed that he was on his way to Rome to straighten things out. He maintained that her fears were unfounded—that he was acting in good faith and that everything would work out as planned. He said the Pope would be cutting his trip short and returning early. Alexander was unconvinced. She confronted a painful reality. “I just didn’t want to put two and two together,” she said. “I didn’t want Paolo to not be the man I believed him to be. I didn’t want the fairy tale to end.” After canceling the wedding, she e-mailed Macchiarini: “I believed you were exactly who you presented yourself to be, to me, to my friends and family, to the world. Congratulations. You charmed me, and all of us, into la la land. I will never, ever understand how you could have done this to me, or to Jessie. Who the hell are you and what the hell is wrong with you?” As Alexander would discover with the help of a private investigator named Frank Murphy, virtually every detail Macchiarini provided about the wedding was false. A review of public records in Italy would also seem to indicate that Macchiarini remains married to Emanuela Pecchia, his wife of nearly 30 years. Murphy, who spent 15 years as a Pennsylvania State Police detective, told me, “I’ve never in my experience witnessed a fraud like this, with this level of international flair…. The fact that he could keep all the details straight and compartmentalize these different lives and lies is really amazing.” Alexander produced e-mails and WhatsApp chats to support her account of Macchiarini’s claims of a relationship with the Pope.In a statement to Vanity Fair, Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See’s press office, was adamant: “There is no ‘personal doctor’ of the Pope with [the] name ‘Macchiarini.’ The Pope has surely never promised to officiate a wedding of ‘Macchiarini’ and does not know someone with such [a] name. On 11th July the Pope was travelling in Latin America and this was on his agenda long time before July … This is enough.” Dr. Mark Holterman, who had written the recommendation letter citing Macchiarini’s treatment of Pope John Paul II, acknowledged to Vanity Fair that “this was a vignette related to me by Prof. Macchiarini,” adding that he had relied “solely on [Macchiarini’s] word.” Andrea Bocelli’s wife and manager, Veronica Berti, laughed when asked if her husband had agreed to serenade the couple: “He was not booked to sing at a wedding. He doesn’t sing at people’s weddings. Castel Gandolfo? Absolutely not!” Annie Féolde, Enoteca Pinchiorri’s flamboyant co-owner, told me that they were never contacted about, much less contracted for, a wedding on July 11, and that they had never heard of Paolo Macchiarini. To understand why someone of considerable stature could construct such elaborate tales and how he could seemingly make others believe them, I turned to Dr. Ronald Schouten, a Harvard professor who directs the Law and Psychiatry Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We’re taught from an early age that when something is too good to be true, it’s not true,” he said. “And yet we ignore the signals. People’s critical judgment gets suspended. In this case, that happened at both the personal and institutional level.” Though he will not diagnose from a distance, Schouten, who is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on psychopathy, observed, “Macchiarini is the extreme form of a con man. He’s clearly bright and has accomplishments, but he can’t contain himself. There’s a void in his personality that he seems to want to fill by conning more and more people.” When I asked how Macchiarini stacks up to, say, Bernie Madoff, he laughed and said, “Madoff was an ordinary con man with a Ponzi scheme. He never claimed to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He didn’t suggest he was part of a secret international society of bankers. This guy is really good.” Photograph by Gina LeVay. VI. Behind the Résumé 
 
 There had been warning signs. In 2012, Macchiarini was charged in Italy with attempted aggravated fraud related to alleged efforts to persuade very ill patients to undergo radical surgery at facilities where Macchiarini had privileges—and where he presumably had a more favorable financial arrangement than at Careggi Hospital. The case is still in the courts, though some of the more serious charges have been dropped. Moreover, in the medical community, it remains a matter of vigorous debate—with claims and counterclaims over the sufficiency and quality of research—as to how well his synthetic tracheas actually work. And then there was the matter of the post which Macchiarini had been offered in Florence, but which for some reason he was never given. What had that been about? During a recent visit to Florence, I spoke with several members of the special commission convened by Careggi Hospital to review Macchiarini’s appointment. The findings had not been made public. They said that things got off to a bad start when one of their colleagues, who had attended the University of Pisa at the same time as Macchiarini, called him out for claiming to have been an associate professor at Pisa when, in fact, he had not been a professor there at all. However, since the “false statement” did not bear on the central question of whether Macchiarini had ever been a full professor—at Pisa or somewhere else—Macchiarini was allowed to submit a corrected C.V. Chaired by a respected general surgeon, the Careggi commission—which included a cardiovascular-and-thoracic surgeon, a pharmacologist, and a stem-cell researcher—tried to verify Macchiarini’s odyssey through academia, scouring his new C.V. and contacting their counterparts in France, Germany, and Spain. While acknowledging that Macchiarini seemed to enjoy a solid reputation as a surgeon and a researcher, one commissioner, Dr. Pietro Tonelli, concluded, “Before coming to Careggi, he had never been a full professor.” Said another commissioner, Dr. Clemente Crisci, “Not only had he never been an ordinary [full] professor in the Italian sense of the term, he had never even been an associate professor in the Italian sense of the term.” When I asked whether this was a matter of semantics, another commissioner with whom I met in Florence said unequivocally, “Absolutely not. He was living in these places for several years. He knew exactly what the titles meant.” Continuing, he told me, “Look at Spain and Italy: ‘professore ordinario’ means ‘full professor.’ ‘Professore associato’ means ‘associate professor.’ This wasn’t a language issue. Same with the other countries. He knew what ‘P.D.’ and ‘H.D.R.’ meant,” referring to Privatdozent and habilitation à diriger la recherche, which one of Macchiarini’s C.V.’s erroneously defines as “accreditation to Full Professor” in German and French, respectively. Vanity Fair contacted many of the schools at which Macchiarini claimed to have either earned a degree or held an academic post. While the University of Pisa confirmed that he indeed received an M.D. and had specialized in surgery, the University of Alabama at Birmingham denied that Macchiarini earned a master’s in biostatistics or that he participated in a two-year fellowship in thoracic surgery. In fact, according to U.A.B. spokesman Bob Shepard, the only record the school has for Macchiarini indicates that he did a six-month non-surgical fellowship in hematology/oncology—which according to the current Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education guidelines is 30 months shy of what is required for a clinical fellowship in that field. The University of Paris—Sud never responded to repeated requests for comment, but Hannover Medical School wrote to say that Macchiarini had been neither a full nor an associate professor there, merely an adjunct. The Careggi commission’s January 2010 conclusion that Macchiarini had misrepresented his professional history put Dean Gensini in a tight spot. Faced with the choice between antagonizing a political master (Rossi) or violating Italian administrative law, commissioners tell me, he chose a middle course. Macchiarini would not receive a professorship and the commission’s full findings would not be released. As a result, over the years, Macchiarini’s stature only grew. (Gensini did not respond to requests for comment.) VII. The Other Shoe ||||| The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 
 
 Awarded to 214 Nobel Laureates since 1901 
 
 
 
 "The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- - -/ one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine ..." (Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel) 
 
 Alfred Nobel had an active interest in medical research. Through Karolinska Institutet, he came into contact with Swedish physiologist Jöns Johansson around 1890. Johansson worked in Nobel's laboratory in Sevran, France during a brief period the same year. Physiology or medicine was the third prize area Nobel mentioned in his will. 
 
 The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. ||||| Two members of the group that awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute have been asked to resign over their involvement in a scandal over the work of an Italian transplant surgeon. Board members at the Karolinska Institute who have not yet quit will be fired, according to Reuters. 
 
 The red flags were there from the beginning 
 
 The doctor at the center of the scandal is an Italian surgeon named Paolo Macchiarini, who developed and transplanted bioengineered windpipes grown from patients’ own stem cells. Two of his patients died, and Macchiarini has been accused of scientific misconduct. He continues to deny these allegations. 
 
 The two scientists who have been asked to resign, Anders Hamsten and Harriet Wallberg, were thought to have ignored warnings about Macchiarini. The red flags were there from the beginning, according to a report from the Karolinska Institute. Not only did he have incorrect information on his curriculum vitae — like a resume, but with more science — his publications contained "questionable" data, and he didn’t cooperate well with other researchers. 
 
 Hamsten was vice chancellor of the Karolinska Institute during the investigations that acquitted Macchiarini of misconduct, and Wallberg was president of the university during his recruitment. "This is a case in which a long chain of poor and absent decisions enabled a visiting professor to contravene the rules and ethical principles," said Karin Dahlman-Wright, acting vice chancellor of the Karolinska Institute, in a news release. 
 
 An external investigation released last week revealed that the three patients Macchiarini performed experimental trachea transplants on at the Karolinska University Hospital weren’t sick enough for the experimental surgeries to be ethical. What’s more, according to the report, the science was too shaky to be performing these surgeries on humans and there "were clear weaknesses in how the informed consent was obtained." 
 
 "A long chain of poor and absent decisions" 
 
 A second case summary released this week and presented in a news conference on Monday revealed that the Karolinska Institute hired the now-disgraced surgeon Macchiarini despite red flags. His contracts were renewed twice "without any evaluation of his activities," and there were serious problems with the way the misconduct investigations were handled. 
 
 The scandal is serious enough that Bo Risberg, a former head of ethics at Karolinska, says that no Nobel prize should be awarded in medicine for at least two years, according to The Telegraph. Instead, the money that would have gone to a scientist should be paid to the families of the patients Macchiarini experimented on, Risberg says. ||||| STOCKHOLM (AP) — The panel that awards the Nobel Prize in medicine is dismissing two judges for their roles in a scandal over a disgraced stem cell scientist at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute. 
 
 Nobel Assembly secretary Thomas Perlmann told Swedish news agency TT on Tuesday that Harriet Wallberg and Anders Hamsten would be asked to leave the 50-member group, which will announce the annual award next month. 
 
 Wallberg and Hamsten have already left high-ranking jobs at Karolinska amid scathing criticism of how the institute handled allegations of scientific misconduct against stem-cell scientist Dr. Paolo Macchiarini. 
 
 Once considered a pioneer in windpipe transplants, Macchiarini was fired after being accused of falsifying his resume and misrepresenting his work. 
 
 Prosecutors are investigating him for involuntary manslaughter in connection with two patients who died. He disputes all charges.
– The medical university that awards the Nobel Prize for Medicine was rocked this week after an investigation presented Monday showed negligence in the hiring and handling of a now-disgraced stem-cell surgeon, Reuters and the Independent report. Dr. Paolo Macchiarini was fired from the Karolinska Institute in March after it emerged his résumé was falsified, he misrepresented his work, and six "guinea pig" patients had died under his charge, per the Telegraph (prosecutors are looking into involuntary manslaughter charges for two of those cases). Among those now told to pack it in: the institute's entire board, which was dismissed by the Swedish government, and Nobel judges Harriet Wallberg and Anders Hamsten, per the AP. "Scandal is the right word," Sweden's education minister said, noting "people have been harmed because of the actions of the Karolinska Institute." The Verge reports that an external probe and case study presented over the last two weeks show that experimental trachea transplants Macchiarini performed had major ethical issues, including a methodology that hadn't been adequately tested and patients who weren't sick enough to qualify for the procedure. Plus, investigators say Macchiarini should have never made it past the 2009 recruitment process, with the institute's management showing a "stunning" indifference to bad references and "questionable" data in some of his publications. The former head of Karolinska's ethics committee, who calls this "the biggest scandal we have ever had in Swedish medicine," per the Washington Post, says the Nobel panel shouldn't award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in October for two years and instead give the money to the families of Macchiarini's patients. (Vanity Fair says Macchiarini used "love, money, and the pope" to scam a news producer.)