He’s the doctor who does the seemingly impossible, going where no other has yet dared.

—Meredith Vieira

I. A Most Interesting Man

The first meeting between Benita Alexander, an award-winning producer for NBC News, and Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, the famous transplant surgeon, took place at the bar at Boston’s Mandarin Oriental hotel. It was February 2013, shortly before Macchiarini would have his initial interview with Meredith Vieira for a two-hour NBC special called A Leap of Faith.

Macchiarini, 57, is a magnet for superlatives. He is commonly referred to as “world-renowned” and a “super-surgeon.” He is credited with medical miracles, including the world’s first synthetic organ transplant, which involved fashioning a trachea, or windpipe, out of plastic and then coating it with a patient’s own stem cells. That feat, in 2011, appeared to solve two of medicine’s more intractable problems—organ rejection and the lack of donor organs—and brought with it major media exposure for Macchiarini and his employer, Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, home of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Macchiarini was now planning another first: a synthetic-trachea transplant on a child, a two-year-old Korean-Canadian girl named Hannah Warren, who had spent her entire life in a Seoul hospital.

Macchiarini had come to Vieira’s attention in September 2012, when she read a front-page New York Times story about the doctor. She turned to Alexander, one of her most seasoned and levelheaded producers, to look into a regenerative-medicine story for television. With blue eyes and raven hair, Alexander seems younger than her 49 years. Though she brims with confidence, friends say she bears the scars of a turbulent childhood in Huntington Woods, Michigan. 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. Two years later, her father, who by then had married a neighbor, asked her to pack up and leave. Alexander overcame her upbringing and in 1987 graduated magna cum laude from Wayne State University with a degree in journalism. She spent the early 1990s working at a string of local television stations and briefly taught journalism at her alma mater. After she met and married fellow reporter John Noel, the two moved to New York City, where she joined NBC’s Dateline. In 2003, Alexander gave birth to a daughter, Jessina. Alexander and Noel divorced in 2009, and in 2012 she married a ballroom dance instructor named Edson Jeune. 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. Murrow Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award.

Now Alexander sat across from Macchiarini at Bar Boulud, in the Mandarin Oriental. At the time, Alexander’s first husband, Noel, was hospitalized with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and she would in time begin sharing details about his condition—as well as about her dissatisfaction with her second marriage. “Having worked with so many patients who are terminally ill, Paolo was immensely helpful as far as helping me navigate my complicated emotions,” she explained when I spoke with her this fall. He also suggested ways to talk about the matter with her daughter. “He was an amazing friend to me during that time, and a solid, reliable pillar of strength. He spent hours listening to me talk about it all and offering gentle advice.” (Disclosure: I worked as a producer at NBC News from 2004 to 2009. I did not meet Alexander until I contacted her in 2015.)

SAVE THE DATE

Alexander in her Matthew Christopher wedding dress. Photograph by Gina LeVay.

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. 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. (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. Richard Pearl, who operated alongside Macchiarini in Illinois. Like others, Pearl described his Italian colleague as a Renaissance man, fluent in half a dozen languages. 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.