Thalidomide

A pill sold as gentle—sedation, morning sickness relief—left a generation of children with missing or malformed limbs. The chemical name that still means regulatory failure is thalidomide.

Marketed Calm, Clinical Catastrophe

Chemie Grünenthal's drug spread through Europe, Australia, Canada, and beyond in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Physicians prescribed it to pregnant women. Epidemiology then caught up to the pattern: phocomelia and other defects clustered where thalidomide had been used. Companies and officials argued, delayed, and minimized while parents counted fingers that were not there.