‘An experienced surgeon knows when to cut or not cut.’ Storyville: Fatal Experiments: Downfall of a Supersurgeon I, BBC 2016
This is Paolo Macchiarini, one of the world’s best surgeons in one of his most difficult moments. ibid.
One of Medicine’s greatest challenges: the lack of spare parts when something goes wrong inside our bodies … attempting to create the first windpipe out of plastic … Everything ended the same way: in death. ibid.
Is he a genius or is he a fraud? ibid.
End of 2014: Accused of falsifying research results and of gross misconduct. ibid.
‘They made misuse of the hype around stem cells to introduce something completely impossible.’ ibid. expert
Star surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was the first in the world to surgically implant a plastic trachea in a human being. Storyville: Fatal Experiments: Downfall of a Supersurgeon II
Macchiarini started to discover faults with his tracheas. ibid.
She didn’t seem to understand the risks she would undertake. ibid.
It was far worse than the doctors imagined. ibid.
Machiarrini’s operations had been stopped in Sweden. ibid.
The doctors got more and more frustrated at their superior’s lack of reaction … They documented all the faults they could find. ibid.
Plastic tracheas were not working as they should. When patient after patient died doctors began to wonder what was going on. Storyville: Fatal Experiments: Downfall of a Supersurgeon III
Falsifying scientific reports and risking patients’ lives. ibid.
It all started with a hijacking in November 1972. I was flying home to Mexico City from an anthropological conference on the history of violence when suddenly a group of terrorists took over the flight. It was too good to be true. Storyville: The Raft, BBC 2019
All my life I had wanted to know why people fight … I realised that if I could create a similar situation it would be the perfect laboratory to study human behaviour, but where can you isolate a group of people and expose them to danger? Then I had the idea … ibid.
Las Palmas, Spain, May 1973: Tonight the ten volunteers arrive in the Canary Islands. It was the first time they met. Ten brave strangers who are about to spend the next three months together isolated on the raft. ibid.
Captain Maria is the only professional sailor on board. ibid.
43 years later there’s only 7 of us still alive. ibid. survivor
The roaring noise of the ocean took over. Finally we are at sea. ibid.
Is violence something that is built into our genes or is it something we learn? ibid.
Instead, we witness a clear example of crowd frenzy, people no longer act as individuals but as part of a dangerous collective. ibid.
The most important question of our time: can we do without war? ibid.
He was a master manipulator. ibid. survivor
I feel completely misunderstood. ibid.
I realised that the only one who has actually showed any kind of violence or aggression on the raft is me. ibid.
Stepping ashore was a very strange feeling. It was 101 days that we had been at sea. ibid. survivor
We started out them and us and became us. ibid.
Cavendish embodies what science and what being a scientist is all about: his curiosity about the world drove him to design experiments in an effort to gain new insights into how the world works. Brian Cox, Science Britannica II: Method and Madness, BBC 2013
In 1966 [Alexander] Shulgin quit his job as a chemist for Dow Chemical to devote himself entirely to the study of psychoactive drugs … Dirty Pictures, 2010
‘Sulgin personally tested hundreds of drugs.’ ibid. news
‘Beyond the therapist’s office it becomes wildly popular.’ ibid. documentary
‘I see psychedelics as spiritual tools.’ ibid. Ann Shulgin
‘Could one stay in a state of bliss for the rest of his life?’ ibid. Alexander
Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigour and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility. Nikola Tesla
For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment. Mark Twain
I will make my life an experiment to search for the principles that govern the universe. Buckminster Fuller, cited All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace II: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Networks, BBC 2011
We live in a world of matter. A realm of tiny particles far smaller than atoms that build the universe we know. But there is a mystery. Of all the particles scientists have discovered, the strangest and most elusive of all seem to defy our understanding of how the universe works. They are called neutrinos. Everywhere and nowhere, neutrinos are so ghostly, they can pass through solid matter as if it didn’t exist. And yet they hold the secrets to why the stars shine and what our universe is made of. Neutrino: Hunting the Ghost Particle, BBC 2021
Today, the quest to detect neutrinos has triggered multi-million-dollar experiments all over the globe. Now tantalising new evidence suggests neutrinos could be the link between our familiar world of matter and an unknown world of particles waiting to be discovered. ibid.
‘Neutrinos have got no electric charge, they’ve almost got no mass at all: they are so near to nothing as you can imagine.’ ibid. Frank Close
This mysterious fourth type of neutrino would lie outside the three already known to exist, and could be a link to an unknown realm of new particles. ibid.
Neutrinos change their identity; neutrinos have mass after all. ibid.
Most of what our universe is made of is missing. ibid.
Imagine a man who experiments by sticking money heads where they don’t belong; or a CIA plan to use a cat as a spy; or how about an experiment that tests if the average person can be induced to hurt ot kill total strangers … The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd s1e8, History 2024