Washington

Two American newspapers are fighting a messy public battle over a series of articles that criticize one of the most respected cancer centres in the world.

Under attack: the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center was heavily criticized by The Seattle Times.

The Seattle Times ran the series, called “Uninformed consent”, last March. The series alleged that the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, failed to tell patients about the true risks of some experimental cancer trials that it ran in the early 1980s. The series concluded that researchers with financial interests in the trials persisted with their research even after they knew it was killing patients. The centre maintains that there was no financial conflict of interest and said in a statement that “the central themes of The Seattle Times' articles are false and unsupportable”.

After bagging a slew of awards, “Uninformed consent” is now rumoured to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, the premier award in American journalism. But with the Pulitzer board set to announce the prizewinners on 8 April, The Wall Street Journal has launched what observers say is an unprecedented attack on The Seattle Times series.

The episode recalls this year's Oscar fight, when Hollywood studios blamed reporters for running a smear campaign against the film A Beautiful Mind. But although the Oscars are known for inspiring massive lobbying crusades, journalists say that they have never seen anything like this unruly Pulitzer squabble.

The battle began on 19 March, when Laura Landro wrote an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal slamming “Uninformed consent”. Landro, an assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, called the series “fundamentally false”.

“Rather than racking up prizes, it should be used as a textbook case on how the media can convey biased and misleading information about biomedical research,” Landro wrote.

Landro noted, for example, that the Hutchinson centre was one of the first cancer centres in the world to acknowledge problems with a trial involving the removal of T cells from bone marrow donated in transplants, when problems caused by the removal became known.

Michael Fancher, executive editor of The Seattle Times, leapt to his paper's defence on 22 March. He accused Landro of failing to disclose her own conflict of interest. Fancher said that Landro had donated money to the Hutchinson centre, widely nicknamed 'the Hutch', after she was successfully treated there in 1992.

“Unfortunately, Ms. Landro is unable to separate her own experience as a patient from her duties as a journalist,” Fancher wrote in The Seattle Times.

From there, the tussle escalated, even though editors at both papers say that The Wall Street Journal is not competing with “Uninformed consent” for a Pulitzer in the investigative reporting category.

On 25 March, The Wall Street Journal published a letter from Fancher in which he accused the Hutch of failing to enact reforms of its clinical-trials oversight process that had been recommended by a review committee. He also said the Food and Drug Administration had found problems with the centre's informed-consent process and shut down three clinical trials there in June 2001.

The Wall Street Journal then devoted an unsigned editorial to an attack on “Uninformed consent” on 27 March. The editorial accused The Seattle Times of sexism and ambulance-chasing. It implied that the paper had not published a previous letter from Landro because the letter would have had to be included in the Pulitzer submission. It also ran a series of letters from scientists and doctors criticizing The Seattle Times series.

On The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, editors claimed that far more is at stake than just a prize for journalists. “We have long felt that medical research needs to be liberated, not inhibited,” they wrote.

Some science journalists say that they are concerned that The Seattle Times series was not as thorough or as scientifically rigorous as it should have been.

B. D. Colen, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and faculty member of the graduate programme in science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the first instalment of the series did not give complete information about the different stages of clinical research, or where the Hutch's experiments fitted into these stages.

But despite the criticism levelled at the series, some observers are defending it on the grounds that the award of the Pulitzer would encourage more investigative reporting into science and medicine.

Another Pulitzer winner, Deborah Blum, president-elect of the National Association of Science Writers, says that she has not read the series. But she welcomes it, saying that there is too little investigative journalism into science and medicine.

“It does not bother me at all that a local newspaper made a cancer centre angry in its investigation,” Blum says. “Especially with clinical trials, it's such a good thing to get inside them and try to make people understand what they are about.”