William Mcbride
Obstetrician who helped to raise the alarm about thalidomide
WILLIAM MCBRIDE, who has died aged 91, was an Australian doctor fêted for his part in alerting the world to the dangers of the morning sickness drug thalidomide; but his later career was dogged by accusations of fraud, culminating in a battle to retain his medical licence.
Mcbride was a junior obstetrician and gynaecologist in Sydney when he noticed a rise in the number of babies born with unusual birth defects. In May and June 1961 he attended the births of three babies with such deformities. Their internal organs had failed to develop properly and their forearms were unusually short. All three died within a year.
His attention was caught by a paper in the British Medical Journal suggesting a link between thalidomide and nerve damage, and he decided to conduct his own research. Attempts to replicate the birth defects in white mice came to nothing – mice, it turned out, being resistant to thalidomide abnormalities. However, the birth of two other severely handicapped babies at his hospital convinced him of the need to speak out. In December 1961 he wrote to The Lancet describing the symptoms and appealing for readers to submit their own findings. By this time millions of women were taking thalidomide for morning sickness, and about 10,000 babies had been born with deformities.
Mcbride’s findings brought him wide acclaim and linked him with one of the biggest medical scandals of the past century. He was profiled in glossy magazines and flown to conferences around the world. He bought several properties and began breeding stud cattle. Using prize money awarded by the Institute of Life in Paris, he set up Foundation 41, a research institute dedicated to studying the effects of certain drugs on foetal development.
However, Mcbride’s persistence was to prove his undoing. In 1980 he alleged that the morning sickness drug Debendox was also linked to birth defects, backing up his claim with experiments in which rabbits were dosed with a chemically related drug. A researcher at Foundation 41 came forward to contest the findings, saying that Mcbride had inflated the number of rabbits to suggest a stronger correlation between Debendox and birth deformity than originally indicated.
Mcbride admitted falsifying data, but claimed to be acting “in the longterm interests of humanity” because he believed that Debendox posed a risk to patients. In 1993 he was struck off the Australian medical register.
He was reinstated five years later, but the strain had been considerable. Though his supporters sought to portray him as a crusader against an unscrupulous pharmaceutical industry cut down by jealous rivals, others saw a figure who had relied too much on selfbelief in the absence of hard data. Meanwhile, the phrase “inventing rabbits” became shorthand for scientific misconduct.
Born in Sydney on May 25 1927, William Griffith Mcbride grew up near Dungog, in New South Wales. He read Medicine at the University of Sydney and worked as a resident medical officer at Crown Street Women’s Hospital. He continued his studies in London, becoming a member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, before returning to Crown Street.
In 1960, after a visit from a representative of the Distillers pharmaceutical company, he began prescribing thalidomide to patients. But his initial enthusiasm soon gave way to concern and in June 1961 he persuaded the hospital authorities to withdraw it. Distillers and its successor, Diageo, have paid millions of pounds in compensation to thalidomide victims and their families.
Mcbride was appointed CBE in 1969 and received the Order of Australia in 1977. He is survived by his wife, Dr Patricia Glover, and by their four children.