Dark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide and Its Revival as a Vital Medicine

Dark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide and Its Revival as a Vital Medicine By Rock Brynner and Trent Stephens (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001) (228 pages; $16.00 paper) While reading Rock Brynner and Trent Stephens' analysis of the mid-century scandal of thalidomide, an eerily similar account was unfolding on the national news. After denigration and denials of the mounting evidence, Merck, the maker of Vioxx, withdrew its lucrative pain reliever from the market. A large federal study had unequivocally demonstrated the dangers of heart attack and stroke that Vioxx posed. The public then found that Merck s directors allegedly had been aware of these substantial risks for years. For this reviewer, Brynner and Stephens' historical tale of the duplicity and injustices associated with the effects of another drug, thalidomide, became starkly prescient. Thalidomide, initially acclaimed as a sedative that was safe even for pregnant women, was actually a teratogenic agent that resulted in the death or horrendous deformity of thousands of infants worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. The authors, one a biologist and thalidomide researcher and the other a historian who experienced thalidomide therapy firsthand, are uniquely qualified to present thalidomide's troubled history and its evolving promise. Today, thalidomide is being used under extraordinarily cautious conditions to successfully treat or control a number of diseases. Thus far, no child has been born with the appalling birth defects seen almost half a century ago. The story begins amid the physical impoverishment of post-World War II Germany. A new German pharmaceutical company, Chemie Grunenthal, which was charged with producing cheap antibiotics, developed Thalidomide in 1954. Key players included Dr. Heinrich Muckter, who had been an army medical scientist for the Third Reich, and Wilhelm Kunz, a relatively inexperienced chemist who was chief of Grunenthal's chemical research division. Authors Brynner and Stephens immerse their readers in the profit-driven, scientifically and ethically impaired development and sale of this new drug in West Germany. The animal studies were unscientific, bizarre, and misunderstood, and there were no human trials. In their place, company employees and German and Swiss doctors were given samples to use as they wished, and they reported that this new drug induced a deep sleep. By 1961, thalidomide was the best-selling sedative in Germany. The daughter of a Chemie Grunenthal employee, born without ears on Christmas Day, 1956, was the first known thalidomide casualty. Tragically, thousands more horrific deformities were seen before that child's parents and the scientific community connected her malformation to the popular new sedative. The drug's financial success blinded Chemie GrUnenthal's executives to the increasingly disturbing reports of its side effects, initially identified as loss of nervous sensation. …