Grünenthal: Los nazis y talidomida / El peor escándalo de todos los tiempos

 The girl’s head is flung back, her mouth open in a cry of pain. She doesn’t feel anything. She is a bronze sculpture symbolizing the suffering of 10,000 or more children around the world born in the ’50s and ’60s who did suffer greatly, and still do, as adults. Because their mothers ingested the notorious drug thalidomide, they were born without legs or arms or with foreshortened limbs like The Sick Child cast in bronze. Some were born deaf and blind; some with curved spines, or with heart and brain damage.

Ver:

Grünenthal / Talidomida: No es cierto que "vale más tarde que nunca..." 50 años después no vale.

The over-the-counter tranquilizer was hailed as a wonder drug when released in the late 1950s. Its maker, Chemie Grünenthal, a small German company relatively new to pharmacology, marketed it aggressively in 46 countries with the guarantee that it could be “given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without any adverse effect on mother and child.” During the four years it was on the market, doctors prescribed it as a nontoxic antidote to morning sickness and sleeplessness—and it sold by the millions.

For nearly half a century, the privately owned company was silent and secretive about the epic tragedy it created while earning a vast profit. Even before its release, the wife of an employee gave birth to a baby without ears, but Chemie Grünenthal ignored the warning. Within two years, an estimated million people in West Germany were taking the drug on a daily basis.

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…it is increasingly clear that, in the immediate postwar years, a rogues’ gallery of wanted and convicted Nazis, mass murderers who had practiced their science in notorious death camps, ended up working at Grünenthal, some of them directly involved in the development of thalidomide. What they had to offer was knowledge and skills developed in experiments that no civilized society would ever condone. It was in this company of men, indifferent to suffering and believers in a wretched philosophy that life is cheap, that thalidomide was developed and produced. (Más)

Ver también:

From the Holocaust to Thalidomide: A Nazi Legacy / By JudyStone, Scientific American

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