He promised to restore damaged hearts. Harvard says it was a scientific fault.

"These additional results kept hope alive," said Dr. Field.

At a scientific meeting, Dr. Murry stated that he had questioned Dr. Antwerpa's findings. On one screen, he placed a cardiac cell slide in his laboratory and, next to it, a blade of cardiac cells from Dr. Antwerpa's laboratory. Then he set up a photoshopped image of the cells of his lab. They looked like the image of the cells of Dr. Antwerpa's laboratory.

During the question period, Dr. Anversa's colleague, Dr. Bernardo Nadal-Ginard, took the microphone to offer a scathing riposte to Dr. Murry.

"I love Plácido Domingo," recalls Dr. Nadal-Ginard. "I would like to be able to sing like Plácido Domingo. I'm trying to sing like Plácido Domingo and I'm failing. "

"You," he told Dr. Murry, "are not Plácido Domingo."

He became known as virtuoso defense.

Harvard investigation

As Dr. Anversa became known and well-supported, he was undoubtedly awarded the highest scientific recognition in 2007: a professor at Harvard Medical School and a post at his university hospital, Brigham and Women's, as director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine.

The hospital and university officials refused to discuss his hiring. In a statement, the hospital said, "Scientific discoveries can often be perceived initially as controversial. The controversy surrounding the results of a search is not sufficient to exclude a qualified person otherwise. "

In 2012, a new controversy emerged.

Dr. Jan Kajstura, a key member of Dr. Antwerpa's team, was the first author of an article in Circulation, which seemed to offer definitive proof that the heart could regenerate. He worked with a scientist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Bruce Buchholz, who measured carbon isotope levels in 36 hearts of people aged 2 to 78 years. Due to nuclear tests carried out in the 1950s, the elderly were exposed to more radioactive isotopes. younger people.

If the body can not produce new cardiac cells, the amounts of radioactive carbon should have been higher in the heart cells of the elderly. But in this document, said Dr. Kajstura and his colleagues, older hearts did not have more radioactive carbon. Heart cells are constantly being replaced, they concluded.