Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

Frances Kelsey

Frances Kelsey

Lived 1914 – 2015.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s about 2,000 children died and 10,000 were born malformed as a result of their mothers taking the drug thalidomide during pregnancy.

Only 17 of these ‘thalidomide babies’ were born in the United States, largely because Frances Oldham Kelsey blocked American sales of thalidomide, stating that its manufacturers had not fully assessed the drug’s risks.

Advertisements

Beginnings

Frances Kathleen Oldham was born on July 24, 1914 in the farming village of Cobble Hill on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Her parents had moved to Canada from the United Kingdom: her mother, Katherine Stuart, with her family from Scotland, and her father, Frank Oldham, from England.

Frances was born just a couple of weeks before World War 1 began in Europe. Her father was a retired British army officer, and he returned to Britain to rejoin the army for the duration of the war. Frances was one of four children – two sons and two daughters. Her parents called her Frankie.

Living on a wooded homestead of about 30 acres, Frances learned to enjoy the natural world from an early age.

When she saw her mother beginning to teach her older brother to read and write, Frances, who was two years younger, copied her brother and soon she was reading and writing too.

Education

Frances began her schooling at Leinster Preparatory School, an all-boys preparatory school close to home. For a few terms, she was the only girl at the school.

Next she attended Saint Margaret’s School in British Columbia’s capital city, Victoria. Saint Margaret’s was about 30 miles (50 km) from home, and Frances boarded there. This was followed by university undergraduate level courses at Victoria College, where she spent two years studying Biology and Zoology.

Her next move took her over 3,000 miles (5,000 km) from home, to the city of Montreal, to study science at McGill University. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1934, aged 20. This was during the Depression, and there were very few jobs around for young university graduates. Oldham decided to study for a Master of Science degree in Biochemistry. Unfortunately, the Biochemistry course at McGill was already full, so she studied Pharmacology instead, graduating in 1935, aged 21.

In 1936, the University of Chicago accepted her application to study for a Ph.D. in Pharmacology. However, her acceptance letter was addressed to Mr. Oldham, which worried her. Chicago believed they had accepted a man. She wrote back, letting them know she would be coming to Chicago and made it clear she was a woman. She learned later that Professor Gelling, whose research group she joined, was horrified when he realized he had recruited a woman. Despite this, he welcomed her to his group. In 1938, aged 24, Oldham was awarded her doctorate.

Frances Oldham and Professor Geiling

Frances Oldham working on her Ph.D. with Professor Eugene Geiling.

Frances Kelsey’s Career in Science

Mass Poisoning in 1937

While working for her doctorate, Oldham carried out research on a drug called elixir sulfanilamide, which caused 107 deaths in 1937. Professor Geiling’s team discovered the fatalities were caused by diethylene glycol poisoning. Diethylene glycol had been used in the medicine to dissolve the active part of elixir sulfanilamide.

University of Chicago

After completing her Ph.D. Oldham was offered and accepted a faculty position at the University of Chicago. By 1942, she was studying drugs that could cure malaria. This led her to become increasingly interested in drugs that pass from mother to fetus through the placenta.

In 1943, Oldham married her Chicago colleague Dr. Fremont Ellis Kelsey and so became Frances Kelsey. It was as Frances Kelsey that she became famous a few years later.

In 1950, she qualified as a doctor of medicine.

Thalidomide

In August 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Washington, D.C. appointed Kelsey as a Medical Officer. Her job was to review applications for drug approvals in the USA.

One of the very first applications that crossed her desk was for thalidomide, a drug that reduced nausea and also acted as a painkiller and tranquilizer. The application, from the company Richardson-Merrell, identified pregnant women suffering from morning sickness as particularly suitable candidates to receive the drug.

The drug had been invented in Germany in 1953 and had been approved for use in Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and 40 other countries.

Richardson-Merrell wanted the FDA to approve the drug quickly for use in the USA. Even without approval, American law at the time allowed the company to send experimental samples to doctors. Richardson-Merrell sent 2.5 million tablets to over 1,000 American doctors who administered it to almost 20,000 patients, hundreds of whom were pregnant.

Kelsey was unimpressed by Richardson-Merrell’s application. She refused to approve it, telling the company their risk assessment of the drug was inadequate. She told them to provide her with more data from controlled studies before she would be persuaded that the drug was safe. Kelsey was worried when she realized no trials had been carried out on pregnant animals to discover if the drug could cross the placenta.

Although the company repeatedly pressurized her to back down and also lobbied her bosses at the FDA, she held firm to her scientific and ethical principles.

Blocking Thalidomide

Three scientists were needed to approve a new drug – a chemist, a pharmacologist, and a medical officer.

In the case of thalidomide, these scientists were Lee Geismar (chemist), Jiro Oyama (pharmacologist), and Frances Kelsey (medical officer). Kelsey’s role was to review the safety and efficacy of the drug. All three scientists found problems with the application to approve thalidomide.

FDA Drug reviews had to be completed within 60 days, otherwise a drug’s approval became automatic. At 60 day intervals, Kelsey blocked the approval of thalidomide, requesting more data. Finally, a storm of bad publicity about the drug blew in from Europe and Australia, and the drug was withdrawn.

In November 1961, thalidomide was withdrawn in Germany for use by pregnant women. The drug was crossing the placenta from mother to fetus, causing shrinkage and deformities in the limbs of fetuses. In many cases, babies were also born with malformed eyes and ears.

Although 10,000 children were born in the world with severe defects, only 17 were born in America. A grateful American government and public thanked Frances Kelsey for her work.

“…some seventeen deformed children born in this country; in about half of these the drug had been obtained overseas.”

Frances Kelsey
Autobiographical Reflections
 

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy presented Kelsey with the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. Also in that year, President Kennedy signed legislation tightening the experimental use of drugs and strengthening the authority of the FDA.

Frances Kelsey and J. F. Kennedy

Frances Kelsey, aged 48, receives the President’s Award.

Senior Scientist

In 1963, Kelsey was appointed head of the FDA’s investigational drug branch. In 1967, she became director of the office of scientific investigations, a position she held until she was 80 years old, standing down in 1995.

She continued working at the FDA as an advisor until finally retiring aged 90 in 2005.

Some Personal Details and the End

In 1943, Frances Oldham married her University of Chicago colleague Dr. Fremont Ellis Kelsey. The couple had two daughters, Christine and Susan.

Kelsey became an American citizen in 1955. Her husband died in 1966.

At the age of 90, Kelsey retired to pursue her hobbies of gardening and solving crosswords.

Frances Kelsey died aged 101 on August 7, 2015 in her daughter’s home in London, Ontario, Canada.

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
Images digitally enhanced and colorized by this website.
© All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Frances Kelsey." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 25 Apr. 2017. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/frances-kelsey/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading
Imperial Vancouver Island: Who Was Who, 1850-1950
J. F. Bosher
Xlibris Corporation, 2010

https://www.fda.gov/downloads/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/OralHistories/SelectedOralHistoryTranscripts/UCM406132.pdf

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • Youyou TuYouyou Tu
  • Elizabeth BlackwellElizabeth Blackwell
  • Howard FloreyHoward Florey
  • Selman WaksmanSelman Waksman
Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Niels Bohr: Founded the bizarre science of quantum mechanics

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • Srinivasa Ramanujan: Untrained genius of mathematics
  • Milutin Milankovic: Proved Earth’s climate is regulated by its orbit
  • Antoine Lavoisier: The giant of chemistry who was executed
  • Emmy Noether: The greatest of female mathematicians, she unlocked a secret of the universe
  • Wilder Penfield: Pioneer of brain surgery; mapped the brain’s functions
  • Charles Nicolle: Eradicated typhus epidemics
  • Samuel Morse: The telegraph and Morse code
  • Jane Goodall: Major discoveries in chimpanzee behavior
  • John Philoponus: 6th century anticipation of Galileo and Newton
  • William Perkin: Youthful curiosity brought the color purple to all
  • Democritus: Atomic theory BC and a universe of diverse inhabited worlds
  • Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered how our bodies make millions of different antibodies
  • Cecilia Payne: Discovered that stars are almost entirely hydrogen and helium
  • Karl Landsteiner: Discovered the blood group system
  • Hypatia: Mathematician – her murder signaled the coming dark ages
  • Matthew Maury: A founder of oceanography
  • Adolphe Quetelet: Body mass index; social physics; the average man
  • Alhazen: A founder of modern optics
  • Diophantus: Father of algebra
  • Mary Somerville: Celestial Mechanics; unity of the sciences
  • Hermann Staudinger: Founder of macromolecular science
  • Percival Lowell: The hunt for Planet X; Pluto; Martian canals
  • Joseph Lagrange: Revolutionized physics; founded variational calculus
  • Howard Florey: Transformed penicillin into a potent antibiotic
  • Selman Waksman: Discovery of TB antibiotic streptomycin
  • Caroline Herschel: Discoverer of comets and nebulae
  • John Wallis: Conservation of momentum; infinitesimal calculus
  • George Hevesy: Discovered hafnium; isotope tracers in biology
  • Martin Gardner: Enemy of pseudoscience; inspirational math
  • Pyotr Kapitsa: Discovered superfluidity
  • Carl Woese: Revolutionized our understanding of life’s history
  • Linda Buck: Discovered how we smell things
  • John Michell: Black holes & weighing the earth in the 1700s
  • Abdus Salam: The second great unification in physics
  • James Croll: Visionary janitor who explained the ice ages
  • J Harlen Bretz: Proven right after decades of mega-flood ridicule
  • Youyou Tu: Malaria drug discovery saved millions of lives
  • Ambrose Fleming: The dawn of the electronic age
  • Ernest Walton: Artificially split the atom; Verified E = mc2
  • Franz Mesmer: Mesmerizing pseudoscience & hypnosis
  • Phillipe Pinel: Founder of psychiatry & humane therapy
  • Rudolf Virchow: Discovered diseases strike by attacking cells
  • Irene Joliot-Curie: The first artificial radioactive elements
  • Thomas Gold: Maverick streetfighter; explained pulsars & hearing
  • Clinton Davisson: Proved that electrons can be waves
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Robert Boyle: The birth of chemistry
  • Hippocrates: The father of Western medicine
  • Sophie Germain: Elasticity theory & Fermat’s last theorem
  • Thomas Kuhn: The paradigm shift

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Ancient Times

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • Howard Robertson – the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong
  • Walking the Universe’s Shortest Planck
  • Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility
  • 11 Great Scientists Who Rose From Harsh Beginnings
  • 13 Great Scientists Who Were Home-schooled
  • Was Archimedes’ Father Really an Astronomer?
  • Interesting Facts about Numbers 0 to 10
  • Quotes – Scientists Bashing Philosophy and Philosophers
  • Einstein did NOT say that!
  • Evolution by Natural Selection – Essential Quotes
  • The Watson Crick Feud
  • The Unsung Heroes of DNA (Not Rosalind)
  • Scientists Behaving Badly
  • Astonishing Ancient Greek Automatons




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Alhazen | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Hennig Brand | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | Democritus | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Diophantus | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Howard Florey | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Martin Gardner | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | George de Hevesy | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens | Hypatia

Ernesto Illy | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Joseph-Louis Lagrange | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Percival Lowell | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | Matthew Maury | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | John Michell | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | Giulio Natta | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Charles Nicolle | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin | Wilder Penfield | Marguerite Perey | William Perkin | John Philoponus | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Proclus | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Adolphe Quetelet | Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Mary Somerville | Arnold Sommerfeld | Hermann Staudinger | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Theon of Alexandria | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Susumu Tonegawa | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

Selman Waksman | George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | John Wallis | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Carl Woese | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2019

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.Accept Reject Read More