1946 The Wirtz family establishes a pharmaceutical company called Grünenthal in Stolberg, Germany.
1954 Two Grünenthal scientists create a new chemical compound that will become known as thalidomide. Grünenthal believes thalidomide has promise as a sleeping pill/sedative, and performs animal tests and then trials in humans.
1957 Grünenthal launches its main thalidomide drug, Contergan. It is marketed as completely safe: non-toxic and impossible to overdose on. Within a few years thalidomide will be sold in forty-six countries.
1958 Distillers, under licence from Grünenthal, launches Distaval, the first of its thalidomide drugs, in the UK.
1959–61 Grünenthal is flooded with complaints that thalidomide is causing (often severe) nerve damage in patients taking the drug. Grünenthal continues to promote the drug as safe, fails to place appropriate warnings on the medication and tries to suppress and deflect the rising tide of complaints. At least two German doctors and one pharmacist ask Grünenthal staff whether thalidomide might malform babies. Grünenthal does not investigate.
1960 Distillers starts selling thalidomide in Australia.
1960 December Scottish doctor Leslie Florence’s letter is published in the British Medical Journal, the first time thalidomide is publicly connected to nerve damage.
1961 March–May Dr Frances Kelsey at the FDA, which is considering whether to permit the sale of thalidomide in the US, reads Florence’s letter in the British Medical Journal and her already sceptical attitude to thalidomide hardens. She demands more information about nerve damage, and then asks whether the drug is safe for the foetus. Kelsey never allows the drug to be sold in the US and is later acclaimed as a hero.
1961 June Dr William McBride in Sydney, Australia concludes that thalidomide is responsible for the severe malformations and deaths of three babies born to his patients. McBride, who has been trialling the drug for Distillers, tells the company of his suspicion. The drug remains on sale.
1961 June–July Wendy Rowe in Melbourne, Australia takes thalidomide samples early in pregnancy.
1961 15 November German obstetrician Widukind Lenz asks Grünenthal to withdraw thalidomide from sale because he believes it is responsible for an epidemic of death and deformity. Lenz has collected fourteen case studies to back his claim. Grünenthal refuses to withdraw the drug and resists until 26 November 1961, when the first report of the disaster appears in the German media. Thalidomide’s global death and injury toll later conservatively reckoned to be between ten and fifteen thousand babies. Some estimates put the toll higher still, with many thousands more having miscarried or been stillborn.
1962 2 March Lyn Rowe is born without limbs in Box Hill, Melbourne.
1968 May Trial begins of seven Grünenthal executives and senior staff charged with negligent manslaughter and other criminal offences over the thalidomide disaster. The trial grinds away until, controversially, it is discontinued in December 1970. Grünenthal promises 100 million marks to a fund to compensate surviving children. Courtesy of a German Government law, further legal action against the company in Germany is banned.
1971 June Nine-year-old Peggy McCarrick (and her mother Shirley) are awarded $2.75 million by a Los Angeles jury. This remains the only thalidomide trial to go a jury verdict.
1970s Thalidomiders in various countries—including Germany, US, UK, Canada, Japan and Australia—receive compensation that, almost invariably, proves vastly inadequate.
1970s Otto Ambros, convicted and jailed for slavery and mass murder at Auschwitz, serves as chairman of Grünenthal’s supervisory board.
2011 11 June Lyn Rowe, now forty-nine and relying on her ageing parents for full-time care, starts a legal action against Grünenthal and Distillers in Melbourne, almost exactly fifty years to the day after her mother took thalidomide.
2012 July Lyn Rowe accepts a multimillion-dollar sum from Distillers to settle her claim. Grünenthal does not contribute to the settlement.
2012 August Grünenthal CEO Harald Stock offers the family-owned company’s first ever apology for the thalidomide disaster—and then attributes the fifty-year delay to the company’s ‘silent shock’ at the scale of the suffering thalidomide caused.