Review: Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims

By Jennifer Vanderbes

ISBN 9780525512264

Jennifer Vanderbes’ Wonder Drug: The Secret History of Thalidomide in America and Its Hidden Victims is simultaneously one of the hardest and easiest books to read. The subject matter is challenging emotionally, leaving readers with an overwhelming sense of confusion over the lack of moral clarity in the pharmaceutical industry and American government not only three decades ago, but also today. On the other hand, Vanderbes’ prose is effortlessly elegant. The book is beautifully written, with compassion and empathy for the victims of thalidomide, mothers and children alike.

“Children of thalidomide” might seem like a throwaway lyric in an old Billy Joel song known for being so comically bad it’s almost good but, like every lyric in that song, it’s a reference to a significant moment in modern (at the time) history. The thalidomide medical scandal of the early 1960s is widely associated with European countries, namely Germany and Great Britain. Thousands of children whose mothers had taken the so-called morning sickness miracle pill–even as little as once in the earliest weeks of their pregnancies–were born with missing or malformed limbs.

France Kelsey, an MD/PhD pharmacologist who worked at the United States Federal Drug Administration in the 1960s, has been lauded as a hero who kept the dangerous drug out of American homes, whereas European governments were less successful. Vanderbes initially frames the narrative around Kelsey, her upbringing and career accomplishments, building to her greatest achievement–keeping thalidomide formally off the American market–for which she was awarded a President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by John F. Kennedy.

However, Wonder Drug is by no means a Frances Kelsey biography, and nor should it be. The ultimate plot twist (although it’s not really a plot twist, because this is a work of nonfiction) is that thousands of Americans were given thalidomide for free in the 1950s and 1960s as samples by their physicians. Many of those patients were pregnant women, and many of them had children born with severe limb deformities known as phocomelia. But because thalidomide was never approved for sale in the United States and all these drug samples were distributed free of charge–often in an undocumented fashion–none of these women nor their children have received any formal government reparations, making the United States the only country to this day to have victims of thalidomide that it refuses to formally acknowledge. The so-called icing on the proverbial cake is that there are actually two forms of thalidomide on the market today, actively used as treatment for certain cancers and AIDS.

Between each set of chapters are excerpts from interviews with American thalidomide survivors. Concise but compelling nonetheless, these interwoven excerpts provide Wonder Drug with both a profound sense of humanity and the gravitas of consequence. Alongside these first-person accounts, Vanderbess also includes the text of corporate memos from Chemie Grünenthal, the German pharmaceutical company that originally pushed the drug, as well as Richardson-Merrell, the American pharmaceutical company that lobbied to have the drug approved for use in the United States while freely distributing samples to physicians around the country, as well as official government documentation about the investigation into thalidomide pending its approval to bring to the American market. The juxtaposition of these incredibly personal narratives with the incredibly impersonal and insensitive corporate and government communications underlies the disconnect between victims of the pharmaceutical industry, the industry that doesn’t care about them, and the bureaucracies meant to protect these people so they never become victims.

Jeanette S. Ferrara, MFA