So why were thalidomide birth defects rampant in Europe but rare in America? It was largely because of one woman, new drug reviewer Frances Oldham Kelsey. Born in 1914 in British Columbia, Kelsey earned both a bachelor and master of science from McGill University. In the mid-1930s, Kelsey wrote to Eugene Geiling, a researcher at the University of Chicago, asking to work in his lab and study for a doctorate. Dr. Geiling replied with an offer of a scholarship for “Mr. Oldham.” Thankfully, he still honored his offer when Ms. Oldham arrived.
In 1938, Oldham earned her PhD from the University of Chicago and would later join the faculty there. She married Dr. Fremont Ellis Kelsey, a fellow professor, in 1943 and the couple had two daughters, all while Frances Kelsey earned her medical degree. Kelsey moved to Washington, DC, to begin her long, distinguished career with the Food and Drug Administration, where she became chief of the Division of New Drugs, director of the Division of Scientific Investigations, and deputy for Scientific and Medical Affairs Office of Compliance.
Kelsey was assigned to review applications from pharmaceutical companies for drug approval. It was a job she was well-suited to, have already proven herself to be masterful detective. While earning her PhD in pharmacology, Kelsey helped pinpoint a toxic ingredient in another drug called elixir sulfanilamide. Elixir sulfanilamide was marketed as something of a cure-all, which should always raise an eyebrow. The drug was very bitter, so the manufacturer added a sweetener. That sweetener, Kelsey discovered, was antifreeze. The drug had already killed more than a hundred people by the time the FDA got it off the market.
Do not drink this.
While it’s imperative to keep antifreeze away from children and pets, it’s a wives’ tale that cats will drink it because of its sweet taste. Cats can’t taste sweet at all.
When the paperwork for thalidomide, sold under the brand name Kevadon, hit Kelsey’s desk in the fall of 1960, she was expected to approve it automatically, since it was already popular in Europe. Her critical eye, however, quickly spotted holes in the data “proving” that thalidomide was safe, and she rejected the application. The “results” in their application were more testimonials than quantifiable science, and the developers had failed to do a placental barrier test to show whether the drug would reach the fetus when taken by a pregnant woman. A chemist working under Kelsey who spoke German also pointed out a higher-than-acceptable number of translation errors in the English copy of the application. In something of a baptism by fire, the thalidomide application was the first Kelsey handled in her new position. There was significant push-back as the drug company lodged complaints against Kelsey with her superiors. Nevertheless, for the next fourteen months, she did not budge. In November 1961, Dr. Kelsey’s careful vigilance was vindicated when Kevadon was taken off the market in its native West Germany and in other countries soon after.
In the aftermath of thalidomide’s European release, thousands of children in Europe were born with partial limbs, blindness, deafness, and/or cognitive impairment. Those who did not die in utero, that is, which is thought to be four times as many. Thalidomide’s effects on fetal development are so dramatic and predictable that doctors can pinpoint in which week of pregnancy the mother took it by which fetal body system was affected. Kelsey’s steadfastness prevented the same from happening in the US. Sadly, this does not mean there were no “children of thalidomide” in the States. Drug reps had given out samples without FDA approval, but the US had only about 1 percent the number of cases seen abroad.
Culture & Religion
English is the third most widely used language in the world, behind Mandarin and Spanish, with about one in seven people worldwide able to speak it. There are about 375 million native speakers and about 220 million more people use it as their second language. It’s often used for work and travel, making it the most international language today.
English 101
English began as a Germanic language, not a Romance language, as many people assume. Romance languages, like French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian, come from the far western reaches of the Roman Empire, where people spoke common, or vulgar, Latin. Germanic tribes (Saxons, Angles, from whom we get the word “English,” and Jutes) came to Britain around 449 CE, pushing out the Celtic Britons or making them speak English instead of the old Celtic languages. Some Celtic languages, like Welsh, Irish Gaelic, and Scottish Gallic, are still hanging on today. The Germanic dialects of these different tribes became what is now called Old English. Old English did not sound or look much like the English spoken today. If a time machine dropped you off back then, and you did not immediately kill everyone around you with disease, you would be unlikely to understand more than a few words. Around 800 CE, Danish and Norse pirates, also called Vikings, came to the country and established Danelaw, adding many Norse loanwords.
Not all Nordic people were Vikings, not even the Vikings. The word viking is a verb, to leave one’s home for adventure and fortune, and those who did it were vikingrs. The majority of people were farmers and tradespeople, just like in other countries.
And they didn’t wear helmets with horns like this one. Sorry, everybody.
When William the Conqueror took over England in 1066 CE, he brought his nobles, who spoke Norman, a language closely related to French. Because all official documents were written in Norman, English changed a great deal at that point, taking in words and dropping word endings. This was Middle English, the era of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales. If a time machine dropped you off and the people did not immediately kill you with disease, you would be able to pick out a few more words you recognize.
If you are wondering where Shakespearean English falls in the timeline, that’s considered Early Modern English. Apart from words we do not use anyone and words that have completely changed their meaning, Early Modern English sounded distinctly different from Modern English (the language, not the band) because of the “great vowel shift.” This was the gradual change in the pronunciation of long vowels, moving them from the front of the mouth to the back over the course of a century or so. “House” was originally pronounced “hoos,” “one” used to be “own,” “plead” was “pled” and so forth. So, if your time machine let you out here, you would probably get by about as well as you did reading Shakespeare in high school.
Scientists and scholars from different countries and cultures needed to talk to one another, so they named things in the languages they all knew: Greek and Latin. Some of those words were absorbed into everyday English, like photograph (“photo” meaning light and “graph” meaning “picture” or “writing” in Greek).
Brother, Can You Spare a Lexicon?
Many other people came to England later at different times, as happens when you colonize half the world. They brought with them different languages, and these languages added more words to make today’s English. English continues to take in new words from other languages, mainly from French (around 30 to 40 percent of our vocabulary), but from many other languages