research-lies-allegations-windpipe update

Paul Alper writes:

Found this today in the Washington Post.

Recall that at my suggestion you blogged about this affair previously:

http://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/06/16/research-lies-allegations-windpipe-surgery/

Damn windpipe surgeons, always causing trouble.

2 thoughts on “research-lies-allegations-windpipe update

  1. In case any of Andrew’s readers missed the salacious aspect of windpipe surgery:

    http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/celebrity-surgeon-nbc-news-producer-scam

    The Pope is mentioned 24 times. Here, according to the article, is how Macchiarini stacks up in comparison to Bernie Madoff:

    To understand why someone of considerable stature could construct such elaborate tales and how he could seemingly make others believe them, I [Adam Ciralsky] 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.”

    Because this Vanity Fair article was written in February, 2016 before things solidified in the political domain, no comparisons were made to Donald Trump.

    • My favorite part was actually “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.”

      I mean – he couldn’t even find friends to write him letters that said he wasn’t a fraud!

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