Consequential stories on important issues in medical research are among the winners of the 2016 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards, including a Swedish documentary that raised disturbing questions about the research conduct of a surgeon at the famed Karolinska Institute, a series in a small weekly newspaper that challenged claims of a local breast cancer epidemic, and a report that researchers at leading U.S. medical institutions routinely disregarded a law on reporting of study results.

The awards program went global last year, thanks to a doubling of the endowment by The Kavli Foundation, and two awards were established in each of eight categories: a Gold Award ($5,000) and Silver Award ($3,500). There were entries this year from 54 countries – up from 44 last year – and the 2016 winners include journalists from China, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The science journalism awards have been administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since their inception in 1945. Independent panels of science journalists select the winners.

Bosse Lindquist and his colleagues at the Swedish public broadcaster, SVT, won the Gold Award for in-depth television reporting for a three-part documentary on Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian surgeon on the staff of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He had gained worldwide attention for his work on synthetic tracheas, or windpipes, for human transplantation. But the documentary showed how patients suffered and died in connection with failed operations, and it raised numerous issues concerning care and research ethics.

Lindquist found that Macchiarini failed to adequately inform his patients of the risks of the trachea procedure and had not done testing on animals before doing the procedure on humans. The SVT documentary, appearing after a Karolinska inquiry already had cleared Macchiarini of charges he misrepresented the success of his trachea implants, caused a sensation in Sweden. Macchiarini eventually was fired, the vice chancellor of the Institute stepped down, and new inquiries were launched.

Peter Byrne, a freelance investigative reporter, received the Gold Award in the small newspaper category for an 11-part series in the Point Reyes Light of Marin County, Calif., that cast doubt on claims of a breast cancer epidemic in the affluent county. He found that women in mostly white suburbs get more screening mammograms than women in lower-income communities. The increased screening also returns higher rates of false positives. Byrne said his reporting on data quality problems afflicting the federal and state cancer registries “needs to be taken seriously by the highest levels of state and national government and by the medical profession at large.”

Charles Piller and Natalia Bronshtein won the Gold Award in the online category for an investigation by Boston-based STAT that found researchers at leading universities and medical institutions had routinely failed to report their study results to the federal government’s ClinicalTrials.gov database, thereby depriving patients and doctors of readily available information that would help them better compare the effectiveness and side effects of treatments. The story helped spur the National Institutes of Health to step up its efforts to improve reporting of results to the database as required by law.

The Silver Award in the online category went to Christie Aschwanden of FiveThirtyEight for three pieces on the process of scientific research and the so-called “replication crisis.” Shankar Vedantam, a Silver Award winner in the audio category, also tackled the issue of reproducibility in scientific research in one of his “Hidden Brain” podcasts for NPR.

Among the winners were journalists who contributed to Nature, NRC Handelsblad in Amsterdam, Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich and the BBC in London.

“Enterprising reporting on the substance and process of research is at the heart of good science journalism,” said Rush Holt, chief executive officer of AAAS and executive publisher of the Science family of journals. “Many of the award winners this year have shown that solid reporting on science can both improve understanding and also trigger change.”

What had been the radio category was changed to audio this year after podcast entries were moved from the online category. The winners will receive their awards at a Feb. 17 ceremony held in conjunction with the 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston.

The full list of winners of the 2016 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards:

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Jop de Vrieze and Zvedana Vukojevic

Large Newspaper—Circulation of 150,000 or more

Gold Award

Jop de Vrieze and Zvezdana Vukojevic

Freelancers, NRC Handelsblad (Amsterdam)

"Het is een prachtig kind. Waarom is hij overleden?" (It is a beautiful child. Why did he die?")

April 23, 2016 (Translation)

In a heartbreaking story about the stillbirth of their son, Mikki, journalists Jop de Vrieze and Zvezdana Vukojevic searched for answers within the Dutch system of prenatal care that might have helped prevent their son’s death. They delved into scientific articles, medical guidelines, policy documents, parliamentary papers and internal documents, and spoke to more than 30 sources. Infant mortality has been a topic of considerable discussion in The Netherlands since a 2003 study found the nation’s infant mortality rate was among the highest in the European Union. Midwives have an autonomous position and are the standard health care professionals for low-risk pregnancies in the Netherlands. Due to the high mortality rate, midwives were forced to establish more regular consultations with gynecologists. The number of stillbirths decreased from 7.7 per thousand in 2000 to 5.3 per thousand by 2013, but a specialist at the University of Groningen said a fifth of stillbirths in the country are still avoidable. Mikki likely suffered from intrauterine growth restriction, with a placenta too small to keep providing him energy during his growth. De Vrieze and Vukojevic described efforts to better monitor fetal growth and to scientifically evaluate the methods used. They noted that the Dutch midwives association recently withdrew support for a system where midwives and gynecologists would work together on risk selection at birthing centers closely aligned with hospitals. Nancy Shute, a health and medicine reporter for NPR, said the story by de Vrieze and Vukojevic led them to an understanding of “why science doesn’t always drive health care.” Christina Horsten, a correspondent for Deutsche Presse-Agentur ─ a German news agency ─ called the piece a “beautiful, gut-wrenching and deeply touching piece of writing that highlights a very important issue.” Vukojevic and de Vrieze talked with colleagues about whether it would be appropriate for them to write about their son’s stillbirth, and concluded that the perspective of the parents was an essential part of a thoroughly researched story. “This award recognizes that such a personal involvement can result not just in a touching, human story, but also in balanced, in-depth and urgent science journalism as well,” the couple said.

Silver Award

Christopher Schrader

Christopher Schrader

Freelancer, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich)

“Narben am Grund - Scars in the Ground”

March 23, 2016 (Translation)

In 1989, German scientists plowed a patch of sea floor off Ecuador to study the possible effects of deep sea mining. They monitored the ten-square-kilometer plot for a few years and then moved on. In the summer of 2015, a new German research vessel returned to the site to explore what had happened in the 26 years since the first excavations in the fragile ecosystem. They found life on the sea floor has barely recovered. Not even bacteria have managed to fully recolonize the scars in the ocean floor, researchers found. Other species have never returned. Some lighter-colored sediments thrown up onto the seafloor during the plowing have not darkened as expected. A 1978 exploratory effort by a U.S.-based company also has raised concerns, Schrader wrote. Its extraction of metal lumps and just a four-centimeter layer of sediment reduced the biodiversity of the affected seafloor, including a significant decline in sea worms, according to 2004 scientific survey. With many unanswered questions, scientists are in a race to better understand the impact of the scarring, Schrader noted, while deep-sea mining for manganese nodules and other minerals has again become an area of interest for resource-poor industrial states such as Germany, Japan and South Korea. Island nations such as Tonga and Naru see it as their route to prosperity. Robert Lee Hotz, a science writer for The Wall Street Journal, called Schrader’s story “an excellent report on the aftermath of a forgotten sea floor experiment.” Shute of NPR said: “Schrader’s lively writing takes readers to the depths of the ocean to discover how a long-ago dredging experiment affects life on the seafloor, and how those ecosystems could be shattered by seafloor mining.” In commenting on the award, Schrader noted that floor of the deep sea is “basically terra incognita” and proposed environmental protection measures “are more guestimates than the product of proper research.” With companies “preparing to send machines the size of houses down there to collect and crush rocks,” he said, “it is very important to have a state-funded research infrastructure available like the German research ships that are there for the long haul and that are funded outside of the logic of short-term projects.”

Small Newspaper—Circulation less than 150,000

Gold Award

Peter Byrne

Peter Byrne

Freelancer, Point Reyes Light (California)

“Busted! Breast Cancer, Money and the Media” (11-part series)

Nov. 5, 2015 – Jan. 21, 2016

In his series for the Point Reyes Light, Peter Byrne took a close look at claims of a breast cancer epidemic among white women in upscale Marin County and found that widespread cancer screening, producing many false positives, is the likely cause of a feared “cancer cluster” in the county. He reported that many non-cancerous findings are erroneously entered in the state’s cancer registry as cancerous. “There is not more breast cancer in Marin than elsewhere, experts say; rather, it is detected more frequently—and often erroneously,” Byrne wrote. “Over the decades, the persistent belief that wealthy white women are more at risk of breast cancer has skewed research priorities and undermined the effectiveness of public health activities around the nation.” In Marin, the county health department excluded non-white women from most of its studies on breast cancer causation, Byrne found, and bypassed data disproving its conclusions. He quoted experts elsewhere who argue that Marin’s high incidence rate is a statistical anomaly caused by sociological factors. The more screenings a woman gets, “the more likely she is to be called back for a second mammogram or to be falsely diagnosed with cancer,” Byrne wrote. He recounted the case of one woman whose misdiagnosis led to an unnecessary mastectomy. When the woman sought her records at the California Cancer Registry, she found that the abstract was missing vital information and contained substantial mistakes. Byrne, who obtained a series of internal audits and progress reports on the registry, concluded that its chronic data-quality problems are worsening. “Peter Byrne’s reporting is exhaustive, showing how a local reporter working on a subject of intense local interest can shed new light on global issues of cancer, misdiagnosis and medical misreporting,” said Hotz of The Wall Street Journal.

Silver Award

Barbara Peters Smith

Barbara Peters Smith

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

“Graying of HIV: After 35 years of the AIDS virus, a generation makes new medical history”

June 5, 2016

More than half of the 1.25 million Americans infected by the human immune deficiency virus (HIV) are age 50 or older, Barbara Peters Smith reported in her award-winning piece. In just four years, that share should reach 70 percent. “As the longevity boom collides with a resurgence of HIV diagnoses nationwide, scientists are just now learning how this persistent, incurable virus ─ along with the powerful drugs that keep it at bay ─ takes a toll on the body that makes natural aging look like a gift,” she wrote. People with HIV experience age-related changes in their DNA more than 14 years sooner than healthy individuals, one study found, and that boosts their risk for earlier onset of frailty, certain cancers, osteoporosis, liver and kidney damage, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Through interviews with patients, doctors, researchers and a community activist, Smith explored how time is taking its toll on a generation of AIDS survivors. Angela Saini, a London-based freelance science writer, said Smith’s story highlighted “an aspect of the HIV story that gets too often forgotten or ignored.” Smith said her story, inspired by an AIDS researcher who described the accelerated aging process he sees in his patients, “found its heart in Jack Cox of Sarasota, a remarkable HIV-positive gentleman who died at 76 less than a month after the story was published.”

Magazine

Gold Award

Stephen S. Hall

Stephen S. Hall

Freelancer, Scientific American

“Editing the Mushroom”

March 2016

The gene editing technique called CRISPR is much in the news, but the judges praised Hall’s piece for not only explaining the powerful new technique but also using a very specific example– preventing the decay of store-bought mushrooms – to show how the new science may be having its most profound and least publicized effect in agriculture. “By the fall of 2015, about 50 scientific papers had been published reporting uses of CRISPR in gene-edited plants, and there are preliminary signs that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), one of the agencies that assess genetically modified agricultural products, does not think all gene-edited crops require the same regulatory attention as ‘traditional’ genetically modified organisms or GMOs,” Hall wrote. Because the gene-editing does not involve introducing foreign genes into the plants, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service decided last year that the crops do not need to be regulated as GMOs, Hall noted. With the regulatory door even slightly ajar, companies are rushing to get gene-edited crops into fields and, ultimately, onto store shelves, he said. One plant biologist has proposed that gene-editing methods can be used to “rewild” food plants by resurrecting traits that have been lost during generations of agricultural breeding. Although CRISPR is more precise than traditional plant breeding, it is not infallible, according to Hall. “Off-target” cuts in the genome have raised safety concerns, particularly for any efforts to edit human sperm and egg cells (a prospect widely decried as unethical). Researchers say that refinements to CRISPR are improving the specificity of the technique. “Of all the CRISPR stories I’ve read, this stood out as both informative and engaging,” said Saini. “It is just excellent.” Hall said he had been looking for an agriculture-related CRISPR story. “My ears pricked up when I was on the phone with Yinong Yang and he mentioned that he had done gene-editing on mushrooms to slow the process of browning,” Hall said. “I do a lot of cooking (and cook a lot with mushrooms), so it made more of a palpable, cutting-board connection with me than other CRISPR-altered crops like rice or potatoes. I hadn’t done a genetic engineering/agriculture story since a 1987 piece for Smithsonian on efforts to develop frost-resistant crops, so it seemed like a good time to circle back.”

Silver Award

Jane Qiu

Jane Qiu

Freelancer, Nature

“The Forgotten Continent”

July 14, 2016

“Listening for Landslides”

April 28, 2016

“Trouble in Tibet”

Jan. 14, 2016

In a trio of stories from China, Nepal and Tibet, Beijing-based freelancer Jane Qiu described how fossil finds in China are challenging ideas about the evolution of modern humans and our closest relatives; how rapid changes in Tibetan grasslands are threatening Asia’s main water supply and the livelihood of nomads; and how scientists are wiring up mountainsides in Nepal to monitor and forecast heightened landslide hazards in the wake of last year’s devastating Nepalese earthquake. The judges praised Qiu’s initiative and in-the-field reporting skills. Her piece on seismic monitoring in Nepal notes that the instrumentation can do more than help pinpoint where the side of a mountain will collapse. Himalayan nations also face increasing risks from landslides because of deforestation, road construction, population growth and other changes that have led people to live in hazardous locations. In Tibet, Qiu talked to herders whose concerns are at odds with reports from Chinese state media about the health of Tibetan grasslands. In delving into the Chinese fossil record on human origins, Qiu told her readers that despite the different interpretations of that record, “everybody agrees that the evolutionary tale in Asia is much more interesting than people appreciated before.” The results remain fuzzy, she finds, because so few researchers have excavated in Asia. “Qiu provides a much-needed perspective on science in Asia, including politically sensitive topics such as the effects of government policies on the environment and economy of Tibet,” NPR’s Shute said. “Two of the stories allowed me to undertake incredible journeys to the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas, where the daily struggle and utter helplessness of many mountain communities inspired me to bring their predicament into the spotlight," Qiu said. "I’m very grateful for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the SciDev.Net Investigative Science Journalism Fellowship for the Global South which made the trips possible. It’s a tremendous honor to be recognized for the work. The award is also a testament to the commitment by Nature to nurture emerging writers and promote excellent reporting in the developing world.”

TELEVISION

Spot News/Feature Reporting (20 minutes or less)

Gold Award