Word: kelsey
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...known, close to 8,000 babies have been born deformed because their mothers used a sleeping-pill-tranquilizer called thalidomide (TIME, Feb. 23). All this added up to the greatest prescription disaster in medical history. Thanks to the intuition of the Food and Drug Administration's Dr. Frances Kelsey,* the U.S. has got off lightly because the drug was never licensed for general use. In the half dozen reported U.S. cases of birth malformations due to thalidomide, the drug was obtained from abroad. Even so, the testing and marketing of new drugs in the U.S. are now almost certain...
Same day, Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey (who used to be a pharmacist himself) summoned his Government Operations subcommittee to hear FDA Commissioner George P. Larrick and Pharmacologist Kelsey. Canadian-born Dr. Kelsey, 48, a low-heeled, no-nonsense woman who has practiced medicine besides teaching pharmacology, was a new employee at FDA in September 1960. Her first major assignment was to pass on the application of Cincinnati's William S. Merrell Co. for a license to market thalidomide in the U.S. under the trade name Kevadon.* Along with the application came a sheaf of reports on years...
While she waited, Dr. Kelsey chanced on a British report that thalidomide might cause a tingling neuritis in some patients. From World War II work on antimalarial drugs, she suspected that this minor effect on adults might signal a more serious effect on the unborn. But not until nearly ten months later, in the last days of November 1961, did German reports link thalidomide with the European epidemic of seal-like, limbless babies...
Though Dr. Kelsey had kept Kevadon off the U.S. market for more than a year, this did not mean that no U.S. doctors were using the drug. (It was licensed in Canada, where at least 56 cases of deformed babies have been reported.) Last week Merrell reported that instead of the 100 or so U.S. physicians previously estimated to have got samples of the drug "for investigational use only," 1,231 had received Kevadon. How much of the drug each doctor got and used was unknown, so there was no way of estimating how many of the terrible blue tablets...
Tompkins had discovered the Ferdinand side of Aught's complex personality. Outside of working hours, he likes people. He certainly hates other bulls. "In 1950, when I bought him," says Aught's owner, Washington Stock Contractor Joe Kelsey, "I tried putting him in with the other bulls. He tore into them. I tried putting him in a separate corral, but that didn't work either. Corrals with a low fence, he'd charge right through, and when I put him in an arena with a six-foot fence, he'd jump right over...