#Dateline the man who wasn t there professional#

“I never once thought about him paying for the trip as him ‘buying’ me in some fashion, or potentially using money to influence me, because, from my perspective anyway … that just wasn’t the case. “I knew that I was crossing the line in the sense that it’s a basic and well-understood rule of journalism that you don’t become involved with one of the subjects of your story, because your objectivity could clearly become compromised,” she told me. It is a bedrock principle at NBC and every other news organization that journalists must avoid conflicts of interest, real or apparent. When it came to money, he was incredibly generous.” Like a pair of teenagers, they attached love locks to the Ponte dell’Accademia bridge, one of them bearing the inscription “B-P 23/6/13, 4 Ever.” Alexander told me that, “when he took me to Venice, we were still shooting the story … He always paid for everything … gifts, expensive dinners, flowers-the works. In June 2013, they flew to Venice for what Alexander called “an incredibly romantic weekend.” Macchiarini bought her red roses and Venetian-glass earrings and took her on a gondola ride under the Bridge of Sighs. The personal relationship between Alexander and Macchiarini continued to blossom. It was the hardest operation I’ve ever scrubbed on.” II. When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t have a textbook. “Scientifically, the operation itself worked. Her anatomy “was much more challenging than we realized,” Pearl recounted.

Hannah Warren died from post-surgical complications less than three months after the transplant. In Peoria, Macchiarini’s medical magic appeared to have its limitations. Another person, who would get to know him through Alexander, compared Macchiarini to “the Most Interesting Man in the World,” the character made famous in Dos Equis beer commercials. Like others, Pearl described his Italian colleague as a Renaissance man, fluent in half a dozen languages. Richard Pearl, who operated alongside Macchiarini in Illinois. (Christopher Lyles, an American who became the second person to receive an artificial trachea, died less than four months after his surgery at Karolinska.) “He’s a brilliant scientist and a great technical surgeon,” said Dr. The trachea transplant on Hannah Warren, the Korean-Canadian girl, was being performed at Children’s Hospital of Illinois, in Peoria, and the procedure was fraught with risks, not least because Macchiarini’s technique was still a work in progress even for adults. When Alexander and Macchiarini found themselves together in Illinois for a period of weeks in the spring of 2013-brought there by the NBC special-they met frequently for quiet dinners.

#Dateline the man who wasn t there professional#

duPont-Columbia University Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award.Īlexander in her Matthew Christopher wedding dress.

Over the years, Alexander has worked with NBC’s top talent-Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer, and Ann Curry, as well as with Vieira-and earned many accolades, including two Emmys as well as the Edward R. Alexander and Noel divorced in 2009, and in 2012 she married a ballroom dance instructor named Edson Jeune. In 2003, Alexander gave birth to a daughter, Jessina. After she met and married fellow reporter John Noel, the two moved to New York City, where she joined NBC’s Dateline. She spent the early 1990s working at a string of local television stations and briefly taught journalism at her alma mater. Alexander overcame her upbringing and in 1987 graduated magna cum laude from Wayne State University with a degree in journalism. Two years later, her father, who by then had married a neighbor, asked her to pack up and leave. In her own telling, just shy of her 16th birthday, she returned home from a sleepover to discover that her mother had left the family. Though she brims with confidence, friends say she bears the scars of a turbulent childhood in Huntington Woods, Michigan. With blue eyes and raven hair, Alexander seems younger than her 49 years. She turned to Alexander, one of her most seasoned and levelheaded producers, to look into a regenerative-medicine story for television. Macchiarini had come to Vieira’s attention in September 2012, when she read a front-page New York Times story about the doctor.