FIRST VICTOR COHN PRIZE SHARED BY ALTMAN AND GARRETT

by Lynne Friedmann

Altman NEW YORK TIMES	Garrett MARC GREENBERG/VISIONS

Lawrence K. Altman of the New York Times and Laurie Garrett of Newsday are co-recipients of the first Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science.

The shared $3,000 award was presented to Altman and Garrett on October 30 as the highlight of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's (CASW) 38th annual New Horizons in Science briefing. This year's briefing was held at Rice University in Houston.

The judges' decision to choose two recipients in the first year of the award underscores the breadth and depth of medical reporting in the United States.
"Altman and Garrett, who have devoted much of their careers to covering public health, show different but equally impressive approaches to that coverage," said Paul Raeburn, who headed the awards committee. "The award honors Laurie and Larry, and their selection honors Vic as well."

A Good Medical Reporter A good medical reporter is, first of all, a reporter after a story, not just a medical story but an interesting and important story. A good medical reporter also has fun, fun talking to some of the world's most dedicated and interesting people, fun writing copy that zings and captures the reader, fun the injects passion into the job, for it is a job that needs passion. A good medical reporter reports for people, not for doctors, not for scientists, not even for editors or news directors. A good medical reporter is privileged to contribute to the great fabric of news that democracy requires. There is no more important job than giving the people the information they need to work, to survive, to enjoy life, to participate in and maintain a free and democratic society. -- Victor Cohn September 1999

Altman, a medical doctor, has been a member of the science staff of the New York Times since 1969. He has won numerous awards, including a George C. Polk award in 1986 for a series on AIDS in Africa, and the Howard W. Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1982, 1982, and 1995. He is the author of Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine.

He received his medical degree from Tufts University School of Medicine. Altman served for three years with the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta as editor of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. He also helped set up a measles immunization program in West Africa.

Garrett joined the science writing staff of Newsday in 1988. She won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1996 for her stories on ebola virus, and the George C. Polk Award for international reporting in 1998 for her stories on the collapse of the public health system in Russia. Before coming to Newsday, Garrett was a science correspondent for National Public Radio and a producer, newscaster, and reporter for KPFA in Berkeley, where she won a Peabody Award for a documentary series called "Science Story." She is the author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Global Collapse of Public Health.

Garrett is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz. She attended graduate school in the bacteriology and immunology department at the University of California, Berkeley and did research at Stanford University.

The Victor Cohn Prize honors work which, for reasons of uncommon clarity, accuracy, breadth of coverage, enterprise, originality, insight, and narrative power, has made a profound and lasting contribution to public awareness and understanding of critical advances in medical science, and their impact on human health and well-being.

"I can't tell you how proud we are of the legacy you're established in my father's name," said Deborah Runkle who, with her sister, Phyllis Beetsch, represented the Cohn family at the awards ceremony.

In accepting the award, Laurie Garrett paid tribute to those who were her mentors, among them Victor Cohn, and issued a challenge to the profession.

"I am concerned with what I see passing as journalism these days," she said. "We have a duty to set standards. The temptations reporters face, from pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street, far exceed what was on the table when I started my career."

Paul Raeburn accepted the award on behalf of Altman.

The Victor Cohn prize, for a body of work published or broadcast within the last five years, was created by the CASW. It honors the late Victor Cohn, a science and medical reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune and then science and medical reporter and health columnist for the Washington Post.

Cohn's journalism career spanned five decades. He was the first triple winner of the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award for newspaper reporting and the first double winner of both the NASW Science-in-Society Award and the AAAS-Westinghouse (now the AAAS-Whittaker Foundation) Prize for Distinguished Science Reporting. Cohn was a past president of NASW and in 1959 co-founded CASW.

Judges of the first Victor Cohn Prize were Carol Ezzell, an editor at Scientific American; Tom Goldstein, professor of journalism and dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; Paul Raeburn, a senior writer at Business Week; Cristine Russell, a free-lance science and medical reporter and special correspondent for the Washington Post; and Lois Wingerson, editorial manager, News and Comment, at BioMedNet (www.bmn.com). The judges said the competition was keen given the large number of high-quality entries received.

CASW is a 24-member panel of scientists, journalists, and educators that develops and funds initiatives to help newspaper, magazine, and broadcast reporters and academic public-information specialists pursue stories on science, medicine, and technology.

The Victor Cohn Prize is the only medical writing award not associated with an industry special-interest group. Generous contributions from nearly 60 friends, family, and organizations have established an endowment to ensure the continuation of the Victor Cohn Prize.

Lynne Friedmann is editor of ScienceWriters.

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