William McBride, Doctor Who Warned of Thalidomide's Risks, Dies at 91

William McBride, who was among the first doctors to sound an alarm about thalidomide, the sedative found to cause birth defects, but whose later career was marred by accusations of falsified research results and other misconduct, died June 27 in Australia. He was 91.

His son David announced the death on Facebook. The location and cause were not given.

In the spring of 1961, McBride, an obstetrician, delivered a baby at Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, who had malformed arms and other problems. Within a few weeks he had delivered two more. In a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet that December, he noted that what seemed to connect the patients was a drug he had prescribed for morning sickness, thalidomide (known in Australia as Distaval).

At about the same time, a German doctor, Widukind Lenz, had made the same connection and documented cases all over Germany. The drug was quickly banned or pulled from the market in one country after another.

McBride was hailed as a hero. But after he set up a research organization, Foundation 41, with prize money he had received from a French institute for his role in the thalidomide matter, he was bedeviled by controversy.

In the 1980s, his research into possible harmful effects of another drug, Bendectin, was called into question, and he became embroiled in a lengthy battle to defend his reputation. He and his supporters believed drug companies were trying to silence him; at one point, he thought they might be monitoring his phone calls. “There are funny crackles whenever I talk on the phone, and it suddenly fades or boosts,” he told The Sun-Herald of Sydney in 1988. “It might be nothing, but the drug companies have been known to resort to drastic methods to discredit those who appear in court against them.”

In 1988, an investigative committee established by his own foundation concluded that he “did publish statements which he either knew were untrue or which he did not genuinely believe to be true, and in that respect was guilty of scientific fraud.” He resigned as the foundation’s medical director. (The foundation soon became inactive.)

In 1993, a tribunal ordered him “struck off” the medical register of New South Wales, barring him from practicing medicine.

William Griffith McBride was born May 25, 1927, in Sydney to John and Myrine Griffith McBride. He grew up near Dungog, north of Newcastle, in eastern Australia.

After receiving medical degrees at the University of Sydney, he served as resident medical officer at several hospitals in the early 1950s. He pursued additional medical studies in London before coming to the Crown Street hospital in 1955. A 1988 article in The Sydney Morning Herald said he had delivered 1,500 babies there before the hospital closed in 1983.

In 1960, a representative of Distillers Co., which marketed thalidomide in Britain, came calling, and McBride agreed to try the drug on some patients. He was the only doctor using it at the hospital when the problems arose, which enabled the quick identification of its link to the birth defects.

Among the many controversies surrounding McBride was whether he was actually the first to make the connection regarding his patients. In 1987, after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. medical journalist Norman Swan, himself a doctor, broadcast a segment questioning McBride’s Bendectin research, news reports on the resulting uproar said that it was actually a nurse, Pat Sparrow, who originally noted the thalidomide link. McBride was said to have initially resisted her suggestion that the drug was at fault but soon adopted that view. In long legal proceedings over thalidomide, which was eventually implicated in thousands of birth defects, McBride asserted that he had tried to bring his concerns to the attention of the drug company but was rebuffed.

“He had no idea of the concept that a drug company would not be pleased to hear from him when he said, ‘There is something wrong with your drug,'” his daughter Catherine McBride told The Australian. “He thought he would be saving them a lot of money.”

His efforts won him accolades of all sorts. They also brought him a thriving practice and a cash award from L’Institut de la Vie in France. In 1971 he used that money to set up Foundation 41 — named for the 41 weeks between conception and birth — to study the causes of mental and physical problems in newborns. As a result of research McBride conducted about the possible risks of Bendectin (also known as Debendox), he became a sought-after expert witness in lawsuits against Merrell Dow, the manufacturer, that blamed the drug for birth defects. But others said the drug was safe. In one case in the early 1980s, McBride and Lenz, another thalidomide hero, testified for opposite sides. The company took the drug off the market in 1983, maintaining that it was safe but saying that making it was no longer cost effective, in part because of the controversies surrounding it.

Swan’s 1987 report and related news articles brought the matter back into the spotlight, challenging McBride’s research, which was based on studies using rabbits. Throughout the resulting tussles, McBride maintained that he was a victim of a drug-company campaign to discredit him.

“We are fighting over a few rabbits,” he told The Sun-Herald. “What is more important — a child’s life or how much a rabbit drank in an experiment?”

Swan said McBride was a victim of his own hubris and his desire to have another success like the early one involving thalidomide.

“Dr. McBride belonged to an era where doctors were unconditionally revered,” Swan said by email. “That was his downfall. He went unchallenged until there was no going back.”

In 1998, McBride won the right to practice medicine again, though with several conditions, including that he not conduct research.

In addition to his son David and daughter Catherine, he is survived by his wife, Patricia Glover, also a doctor; another daughter, Louise; another son, John; and seven grandchildren.

One reason McBride sought reinstatement, when he was in his 70s, was that he wanted to work in American Samoa, where, he said, his expertise in obstetrics and gynecology were in demand and he had already done work on a provisional basis.

“I was delighted to see how well I could operate,” he said. “I did a cesarean in 20 minutes.”