New York Times - The Public's Quiet Savior From Harmful Medicines
She is unlikely to be mentioned at any 50th-birthday parties this year, but she is the reason many of those celebrations will take place. Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey is 96 now, nearly deaf and barely mobile, as modest as her faded house in this Washington suburb.
And though her story is nearly forgotten, she was once America’s most admired civil servant — celebrated for her dual role in saving thousands of newborns from the perils of the drug thalidomide and in serving as midwife to modern pharmaceutical regulation.
On Wednesday, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, will honor Dr. Kelsey with the first Kelsey award. It will be given to a F.D.A. staff member annually.
[Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey, Ph.D., M.D., born 24 July 1914 is a pharmacologist, most famous as the reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who refused to authorize thalidomide for market because she had concerns about the drug's safety.
Her concerns proved to be justified when it was proven that thalidomide caused serious birth defects. Kelsey's career intersected with the passage of laws strengthening the FDA's oversight of pharmaceuticals. Kelsey graduated from high school at age 15, and enrolled at McGill University to study pharmacology. At McGill she received both a B.Sc.(1934) and a M.Sc.(1935) in pharmacology.]
