Times reporters win award for 'Hutch' series

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The Seattle Times' investigation of the conduct of two clinical trials at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has been awarded one of journalism's most prestigious prizes.

Times reporters Duff Wilson and David Heath were among the winners of the 2001 George Polk Awards, announced this week by Long Island University.

Their five-part series, "Uninformed Consent: What patients at 'The Hutch' weren't told about the experiments in which they died," was published last March. The series detailed how patients were not given critical information about experiments in which they enrolled, including information about earlier patient deaths and about physician-researchers' financial interests in the drugs being tested.

The series sparked efforts for reform both locally and nationally. An internal advisory group at The Hutch has recommended a new policy that would ban researchers from having a financial interest in their research — the toughest policy of any medical-research center in the country.

Wilson and Heath were awarded the Polk award in medical reporting. The series earlier won the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award.

There were 12 winners in other Polk categories, including another newspaper owned by The Seattle Times Co., the Yakima Herald-Republic. Reporters Jesse Hamilton, Stephanie Earle, Tom Roeder and Mark Morey won the award in regional reporting for their reporting on last year's Thirty Mile fire and the deaths of four firefighters.