This is on point. I'm Begna Chacrabardi. In the 1950s, the German pharmaceutical company

Kimi Grunenthal released a new drug onto the market. It was a non-addictive sedative that

was advertised as completely safe. It was marketed and distributed in 46 countries and

became one of the world's largest selling drugs at the time. Until 1961, when it was banned

and Kimi Grunenthal formally withdrew it from the market. The drug was called the lidomide.

I said, go and get my baby and she's still alive. I said, go and get my baby. I want to

see her. And she brought my baby and I unwrapped her and pulled down with tears because I could

see all her limbs are affected.

Andre Bokitko told the BBC, she was one of more than 10,000 mothers worldwide whose

babies were born with severe limb defects after she took the lidomide as an anti-nauzia drug

during pregnancy. For years, Kimi Grunenthal had insisted the lidomide was safe and had a wide

variety of uses. Sample packets were sent to physicians to give out freely to their patients.

But it didn't take long for mothers and doctors to realize something was going very, very

wrong. Here's Dr. Martin Johnson, former chairman of the United Kingdom's the lidomide

Trust.

Damage varied from day to day. If the mother took the drug on around day 20, you'd be getting

central brain damage and 21, it would be the eyes and 22 to 3, it would be the ears and

the hearing and the face. And day 24, it would be the upper limb damage. So a tablet on

day 24 was capable of removing a complete pair of arms. And over the next four days,

corresponding patterns of leg damage.

The disaster was unfolding largely in Europe. The lidomide was never approved or marketed

in the US. And that's because in 1960, a woman named Dr. Francis Kelsey became the FDA's

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