SAYING ‘NO’ TO DRUG AVERTED CALAMITY
Pharmacologist’s fear of thalidomide proved right
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
The news is full of belated acknowledgments of women scientists pushed into the background by male colleagues, from those who cracked Nazi military codes at Bletchley Park to women who did important mathematics for NASA during the early years of the space program.
But this pharmacologist stood squarely in the glaring international spotlight of a hostile con- troversy and refused to authorize for North America — it was popular in Europe — a drug she deemed unsafe. She saved thousands of unborn babies from the serious birth defects caused by thalidomide.
Frances Oldham Kelsey was born July 24, 1914 at Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island, to Frank and Katherine Stuart Oldham. Her mother’s family was progressive, one of her aunts was a doctor and another was a lawyer. Her father was a former British army officer. “Frankie” attended St. Margaret’s School in Victoria and at 15 went up to Victoria College, then McGill University, where she completed an MSc. She played on McGill’s championship basketball team.
When she applied for a job at the University of Chicago, the professor hiring assumed Frances Oldham was male and offered “him” the position. She accepted. Years later, Ingrid Peritz reported, she wondered whether she’d have had her big break if she had been named Mary Jane.
She married Fremont Ellis Kelsey, another pharmacologist, quickly bore two daughters, and earned a medical degree. In 1961, working for the U.S. government’s Food and Drug Administration, she noticed troubling observations about a new drug called thalidomide. She challenged the pharmaceutical company lobbying to have it approved for North America. She refused to budge. A year later, a catastrophe unfolded in Europe. Mothers who had used thalidomide gave birth to babies with birth defects that included malformed or missing limbs, heart abnormalities, deafness and blindness. In 1962, Kelsey received a national award for distinguished public service from president John F. Kennedy. He praised her exceptional judgment in preventing a similar tragedy.
She worked at the FDA until she was 90. At the foot of the bed where she spent her last days hung a watercolour painting of the home on Vancouver Island that she visited as often as she could. She was appointed to the Order of Canada and received the honour the day before she died on Aug. 1, 2015 at the age of 101.