
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.
