Macchiarini case: seven researchers are guilty of scientific misconduct, rules Karolinska’s president

Seven researchers, including the now disgraced surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, are guilty of scientific misconduct, the president of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has ruled.

Ole Petter Ottersen, who took office in 2017 with a mission to clean up the institute after a scandal over bioengineered implants damaged its reputation, asked for six articles to be retracted, including two published in the Lancet.

More controversially, he included in his list one of Macchiarini’s co-workers, Karl-Henrik Grinnemo, who had alerted the institute to defects in the articles as long ago as 2014. Whistleblowing after the event, said Ottersen, could not exculpate a researcher from criticism if he was a coauthor of the relevant article.

He said, “It is KI’s [the Karolinska Institute’s] firm opinion that a whistleblower who has participated in in a scientific …