New Horizons in Science

Assuring the public that prescription drugs are safe is a tricky business, because the data are often locked in pharmaceutical company vaults. Bruce Psaty has used publicly available court documents released in lawsuits to write about drug-safety problems that have been kept secret by the drugs’ makers. His findings call into question not only the behavior of drug companies, he says, but also the work of reporters. In a parallel project, he has combined large population-based cohort studies with data from gene chips to uncover genetic causes of disease, a project that may in the future help lead to better treatments—and safer drugs.