Times wins more honors for articles on 'Hutch'

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The Seattle Times has won three more national journalism awards for investigative articles on the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Harvard University on Tuesday awarded the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, with $25,000, to Times reporters Duff Wilson and David Heath.

The judges said the Times series, "Uninformed Consent: What patients at 'The Hutch' weren't told about the experiments in which they died," showed that patients had been deprived of essential information about the risks of clinical cancer trials.

The prize honors investigative reporting that promotes "more effective and ethical conduct of government."

Last week, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards gave the Roy W. Howard Award for Public Service Reporting in the large-newspaper category to the same series of articles.

Those judges said the series, published last March, "was distinguished for us above all by its degree of difficulty. The authors faced a revered, secretive, self-protecting local institution that cloaked itself in an aura of infallibility and expertise."

The Times also won first place in investigative reporting from the National Headliner Awards contest sponsored by the Press Club of Atlantic City.

The newspaper is the first three-time winner, and Wilson is the first two-time winner, in the 10-year history of the Goldsmith Prize, administered by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Uninformed Consent" previously won the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award and the George Polk Award for Medical Reporting.