Paolo Macchiarini: Disgraced surgeon is sentenced to 30 months in prison

More than a decade after he first transplanted a synthetic trachea into a patient, the Italian surgeon and researcher Paolo Macchiarini, 64, has been sentenced to two years and a half in prison by a Swedish court.

On 21 June the Court of Appeal in Stockholm concluded that Macchiarini’s interventions on three patients who later died amounted to serious assault. Prosecutors in the case said that the interventions could not have been considered medical care and were not consistent with proved scientific methods and therefore could not go unpunished.

Last year Macchiarini was convicted by the Solna District Court, in northern Stockholm, of causing bodily harm with …