Fatal experiments : the downfall of a supersurgeon. Part 2: every surgeon has his own graveyard.

The second in a three-part series about renowned Italian surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini. He aimed to revolutionise medicine by creating a new type of synthetic organ which could save thousands of lives but ended up accused of falsifying medical documents and using terminally ill patients as human guinea pigs. This part refers back to Spring 2012 and Macchiarini's surgery to implant synthetic tracheas. The key focus case is a young Russian mother, Julia Tuulik. We look back at her story, with family footage and photographs and a moving video recording in which she says why she wishes to volunteer for the tracheal transplant surgery. With unedited footage taken from a German film company making a documentary about Macchiarini at the time, Lindquist pieces together this part of the story and narrates over the detailed surgical footage. Some troubling footage shows Macchiarini discussing the three plastic tracheas prepared for the surgery, which were each faulty in some way. Furthermore, his only surviving previous patient was now very unwell but Macchiarini and his team keep this quiet as they prepare for the surgery on Julia. We hear from his family about how life had been after the transplant, how many procedures he'd endured and his subsequent death. The autopsy results showed that no new organ tissue had grown and suspicions arose the Macchiarini had falsified his medical reports on the case. Shortly after Julia's surgery, Macchiarini performed surgery on a two-year old child who died three months later and a 21-year-old girl who ended up staying in hospital for over three years, undergoing 7000 treatments, before she died. In October 2013, Macchiarini's transplant work in Sweden was stopped which left his patients without specialist help. The programme ends by updating the viewer on Julia's progress after the surgery. Her mother and husband describe the many difficulties she had with bouts of coughing, difficulty breathing and infections. Her plastic trachea was replaced with a new one but her condition did not improve and her final days were excruciating. She died at home alone in 2014. Nevertheless Macchiarini's surgery on Russian patients continued until finally the Karolinska Institute commissioned an investigation.