Gardiner Harris has an important story in this morning’s New York Times science section, in which he reveals secret recordings of drug execs in a meeting with a scientist-critic.

At least, I think it’s important. I’d like to tell you that Harris’s story provides fascinating insight into behind-the-scenes drug-company dealings with outside researchers. Or that it reveals blatant hypocrisy, or even illegal activity.

But it’s hard to tell.

Rather than putting the news in the lede, Harris begins with history–often a bad idea in newspapers, a warning that we’re entering a poorly organized story: ”Readers, beware: Twists, falling rocks, and speed bumps ahead!”

Harris gives us three grafs of history and background, in which the only news is that Dr. Steven E. Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic wore a wire during a 2007 meeting with execs of GlaxoSmithKline, where they discussed potential heart risks of the diabetes drug Avandia.

Then Harris tries to assess the importance of those recordings, before we know what they contain, saying they “have suddenly become keenly relevant.” Next, more recent history about Avandia, and its sales figures.

We’re now four fat paragraphs into this story, and we still don’t know what it’s about. The headline doesn’t help, either: “A Face-Off on the Safety of a Drug for Diabetes.” The Times was apparently unwilling or unable to say that the drug is safe, or it isn’t, leading to the uninformative “face-off.”

In the fifth graf, Harris reports that the execs said on tape that they would release a safety study within days, but still haven’t released it. That’s a little suspicious, but we’re still waiting to find out what the tapes say about the safety of the drug.

If I were not tracking this story, I would have already turned the page. Too many speed bumps for me. So let’s drop the graf-by-graf analysis and get to the good stuff, if we can find it.

It turns out that the most interesting things in the conversation were said by Nissen, who says he’s found an increased risk of heart deaths in patients taking Avandia. “Now what am I going to do…Do I sit on it?” he asks. That’s no different from what Nissen has repeatedly said publicly–so no great revelation here.

The next most interesting thing I spotted in the story came not from the tapes, but from Congressional investigators, who said the execs had been faxed a copy of Nissen’s unpublished study by a reviewer–a serious violation of scientific practice. That’s an unexpected turn; I thought this was a story about the tapes, not a Congressional investigation.

So what do these newly revealed tapes tell us? That the execs were unhappy about the critical study, and the author of the critical study was unhappy with the execs for not doing better studies on their own. Each side said what you’d expect it to say, and what they’ve said many times publicly since this 2007 meeting.

Maybe not such an important story after all. Sometimes a poorly organized story is a reflection of reporting that doesn’t have much to tell.

- Paul Raeburn

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 10:37 am and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.