A few days after the team had handed in the draft, Katches met Kissinger, Spivak, and Rust in his glass-paneled office. He knew the trio was excited about the article it had sent him a day earlier. He also knew that a difficult conversation lay ahead.

Katches had kept an eye on the emerging story by “peeking in” to the open computer system in which the team was writing their story. He had also met with Kissinger, Spivak, and Rust every couple of weeks during the previous months, “finding out where [the team] is at, what we’re learning, what steps we still need to take to complete what we were doing.” Otherwise, he had kept his distance. “When I was a reporter myself, what bothered me a little bit were editors who would form conclusions before I was done with the story,” he says. “I want to see what direction they’re headed in, but this isn’t the only project I’m managing. I like to give the reporters a chance to write a finished draft before I weigh in."

Still, he had begun to develop concerns about the article. For years, it seemed to Katches, journalism had been intimidated by scientific expertise. Here was an opportunity for journalists to make their own determination, rather than merely parrot the arguments of experts. Instead of providing readers with an article that merely surveyed the various arguments surrounding BPA—however competently—they could and should judge the merit of such debates for themselves. “I thought, look, if you’re going to write about this story that’s going to scare the shit out of a lot of people, I would really like to have a better sense of what science really says about these chemicals,” Katches says. “I figured if we were going to do some real investigative reporting, let’s look at these studies and try to make sense of them. Susanne has the scientific skills to do it.”

Facing Rust and Kissinger across the table, and Spivak who stood by their side, Katches broke the news: the article wasn’t what he was looking for. “I’m not exactly a passive-aggressive guy. I don’t mince words. I basically told them that the story wasn’t as good as it could be, that we needed to do better,” Katches recalls. First of all, he didn’t want a piece on endocrine disruptors in general. Katches felt an article on one chemical—BPA—would far more effectively capture reader interest. What’s more, he didn’t want the BPA material buried in a long, dry article. He wanted Rust to write a piece leading on the BPA debate. He suggested a two-part series rather than a single article.

But most important, rather than repeat the various claims made about the chemical, Katches wanted the team to make the call for themselves: How dangerous was BPA? Specifically, he wanted the trio to look at the research, and not just take Frederick vom Saal’s word that BPA was dangerous and that government studies were slanted towards industry. Katches insisted that “I don’t want Fred vom Saal telling me this. I want you to tell me this,” recalls Rust. Katches did not want Rust—or anyone else on the team—to conduct independent scientific experiments. But he did want her to analyze the science and tell him what she had found, rather than rely on the judgments of others. “I'm very big on 'show me, don't tell me.' And the only way you could show if BPA was dangerous was to roll up your sleeves and dive into the body of scientific research,” Katches says. “Who funded the studies, what did they find? Those were the key questions I wanted to understand.”

His verdict blindsided the investigative team, exhausted from the past few months and feeling intense pressure to “prove ourselves” because of the time and money already invested in the project. Spivak, in particular, was visibly unhappy. “It was tense, it was heated... I remember thinking that somebody is going to hit somebody else,” Kissinger says. “He [Katches] basically said you guys don’t have it. You haven’t proved it to me. You need to sharpen this a lot. I really don’t care about a he-said, she-said, if one scientist says this and another says that… Don’t get me in the middle of a volley.”

But how should they unpack the research? What direction should their story now take, and how would they carry out their own independent investigation? The team wasn’t sure.