While Julia Tuulik is only one of the patients discussed in Netflix’s Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife, her case has been influential in bringing down Paolo Macchiarini.
There is nothing quite like a new, shocking three-part Netflix documentary to make the whole world question everything they thought they knew about regenerative surgery and celebrity doctors.
Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife watches a bit like a fictional medical thriller.
But the all-too sad reality is that this docuseries (based on true events) exposes the fraudulent actions of the real Paolo Macchiarini, and the very real patients who paid the price for his unethical experiments.
What happened to Julia Tuulik
Julia Tuulik (also written as Yulia Tuulik) is one of the patients who received one of Macchiarini’s now-infamous plastic tracheas.
However, though Tuulik’s original 2012 surgery seemed to be fairly successful and quickly made global headlines, her story swiftly devolved into what turned out to be a real-life nightmare.
Tuulik, who had her first operation in Russia at 34 years of age, died only two years after this surgery, in 2014.
This was after she was in a serious car accident which left her unable to breathe without medical intervention, but reportedly not terminally ill.
And while her exact cause of death is unknown, she suffered a trachea collapse in the months following her first operation, and detailed a “rotting” smell in an email written shortly before her death.
Tuulik’s story is only one of eight tragic cases linked to Macchiarini’s misconduct (the only patient who survived this procedure eventually had his implant removed).
But her story did help to set the wheels in motion for what would eventually become dozens of reports, reviews, complaints, and legal cases brought against Macchiarini.
Paolo Macchiarini’s downfall: A timeline
While Tuulik’s case certainly helped to make Macchiarini’s methods a topic for global discussion, his approach had already started raising eyebrows as early as 2014.
Unfortunately, it still took more than five years after Tuulik’s passing for Macchiarini’s case to reach the courts, as explained in the compressed timeline below:
| Date | Description |
| June 2014 | The first report questioning Macchiarini’s conduct surfaces at the Karolinska Institutet (KI) |
| June, August and September 2014 | More misconduct reports surface, this time from Macchiarini’s KI colleagues |
| End of 2014 | KI seeks the help of Bengt Gerdin to examine some of the reports |
| 2015 | Macchiarini is cleared in the case of scientific misconduct, but is found guilty of misconduct in research in the cases brought forth by his KI colleagues (though this is later refuted) |
| January 2016 | Vanity Fair publishes an article claiming that Macchiarini lied on his CV |
| January 2016 | The three-part SVT documentary “The Experiment” premieres |
| March 2016 | KI dismisses Macchiarini after months of vacillation |
| September 2020 | Macchiarini is charges with aggravated assault in connection to three different surgeries |
Tuulik’s case helped to set things in motion
Though there is really nothing that can make up for the way that Tuulik died following her failed plastic trachea implantation, the broadcasting of her case did eventually help to expose some of Macchiarini’s lies.
In reality, the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm would probably have never re-evaluated Macchiarini’s previous cases and published research if it were not for the “The Experiment” documentary which focused closely on Tuulik’s case.
Macchiarini’s defense
While it may be difficult to understand the hold that Macchiarini seemingly had on the world of artificial trachea implants a decade ago, now that we have all the evidence, the crucial “The Experiment” documentary was actually criticized for “reality-twisting” when it was first released.
And regardless of the case that the documentary made against Macchiarini, he maintained that Tuulik was ill enough to qualify for clinical trials, had been informed about the risks involved and, (perhaps more worryingly) had been approved for the surgery via a videoconference which included about 30 different medical professionals.
Why Tuulik agreed to the surgery in the first place
It may be difficult to understand why Tuulik would elect to have such an experimental surgery if she had not been terminally ill (as “The Experiments” posited).
However, while we will likely never truly be able to understand exactly what went into Tuulik’s decision, it seems like she was just hoping for a better life.
Tuulik stated in a 2014 interview with NBC News that Macchiarini and his team “offered for [her] this one chance”. Tuulik also likely believed that the surgery would be safe.
Leonid Schneider’s For Better Science reported in 2016 that Tuulik had been told that the material used in the artificial trachea was “very safe” and that “Paolo is the best surgeon in the world” before she had her surgery.
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