Morton Mintz, Post reporter with a muckraker spirit, dies at 103

A pioneer in consumer affairs journalism, he helped expose the deformity-causing hazards posed by thalidomide, a once-popular drug for morning sickness.

Updated
July 28, 2025 at 11:15 a.m. EDT yesterday at 11:15 a.m. EDT


Morton Mintz in the Washington Post newsroom in 1971. (Gerald Martineau/The Washington Post)

By Stefanie Dazio

Morton Mintz, a Washington Post reporter who brought a muckraker’s zeal to business reporting, notably by helping expose the baby-deforming drug thalidomide and General Motors’ efforts to smear a little-known consumer advocate named Ralph Nader, died July 28 at his home in Washington. He was 103. ... His son, Daniel Mintz, confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.

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annsj 17 hours ago.

I am tired of misinformation about thalidomide. Thalidomide was not "promoted as an antidote to morning sickness." It was a highly effective sleeping pill, a hyponotic or sedative, as the obit says. Any use of thalidomide for morning sickness was off-label. Imagine if it had been prescribed to pregnant women in 45 countries. Millions of children would have been born with deformities, most notably phocomelia (flipper-like limbs), not just 10,000 worldwide. OB-GYNs would have seen the birth defects years before the trend of deformed babies was detected in 1961, and they would have quickly deduced the cause.
My father was a colleague of Dr. Frances Kelsey, who was a CLINICAL pharmacologist, an M.D., not a pharmacologist. Dr. Kelsey was dining at our Bethesda home when Morton Mintz's story broke on July 15, 1962. As an adult, I interviewed Dr. Kelsey extensively about her role in holding up Merrell's 1960 New Drug Application for thalidomide (Kevadon). She did not know about the birth defects, but she knew shoddy, incomplete safety data when she saw it, and that's what Merrell submitted. The drug company expected the FDA to rubberstamp its application. Dr. Kelsey wanted more and better safety data--scientific studies, not mere testimonials-- so she fortuitously stalled the NDA, long enough for an alarming outbreak of phocomelia in newborns to occur in West Germany.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) had been investigating the price of drugs (holding hearings); he believed that drug companies were price-fixing and publishing deceptive ads in medical journals. Kefauver tried to amend the then-current U.S. drug law, but his bill was trumped by JFK (long story), who wanted drug industry support for his Medicare idea. The Senator's disgruntled economist, John M. Blair, leaked the thalidomide story after it was clear July 12, 1962 that his bill was dead. It landed in Mintz's lap.
Bendectin, not thalidomide, is the morning sickness drug.

Frances Oldham Kelsey

Frances Oldham Kelsey


Born: Frances Kathleen Oldham; July 24, 1914
Cobble Hill, British Columbia, Canada
Died: August 7, 2015 (aged 101); London, Ontario, Canada
Citizenship:
Canada
United States (from 1950s)
Alma mater:
Victoria College, British Columbia
McGill University (BSc, MSc)
University of Chicago (PhD, MD)
Occupation: Pharmacologist
Known for: Preventing thalidomide from being marketed in the United States

Medical career
Field: Physician
Awards: President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service (1962)

Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey CM (née Oldham; July 24, 1914 – August 7, 2015) was a Canadian-American pharmacologist and physician. As a reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), she refused to authorize thalidomide for market because she had concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug's safety. Her concerns proved to be justified when it was shown that thalidomide caused serious birth defects. Kelsey's career intersected with the passage of laws strengthening FDA oversight of pharmaceuticals. Kelsey was the second woman to receive the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, awarded to her by John F. Kennedy in 1962.

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Work at the FDA and thalidomide


Kelsey received the President's Award for Distinguished Federal
Civilian Service from President John F. Kennedy, 1962

In 1960, Kelsey was hired by the FDA in Washington, D.C. At that time, she "was one of only seven full-time and four young part-time physicians reviewing drugs" for the FDA. One of her first assignments at the FDA was to review an application by Richardson-Merrell for the drug thalidomide (under the tradename Kevadon) as a tranquilizer and painkiller with specific indications to prescribe the drug to pregnant women for morning sickness. Although it had been previously approved in Canada and more than 20 European and African countries, she withheld approval for the drug and requested to see clinical trial information. At the time, the FDA could only withhold approval for 60 days at a time, so she continually requested further information from the company every 60 days for over a year. Her initial reason for doing this was that the testimonials supplied by Richardson-Merrell contained no scientific methodology, and she recognized their authors as having published suspicious articles in the past.

In December 1960, Leslie Florence published a letter in the British Medical Journal connecting thalidomide to neurological symptoms. Kelsey saw this letter and added Florence's observed symptoms to her ongoing data requests. The unexpected neurological effects caused her to recall her earlier work on the mechanism of birth defects, so she also requested animal studies to demonstrate that the drug would not be harmful to the fetus. In fact, Richardson-Merrell had reportedly discovered birth defects when the drug was tested on rats but did not report this finding; Kelsey was instead sent misleading partial data suggesting the product was safe for pregnant women. Despite the fact that thalidomide was already widely used in Europe and elsewhere, Kelsey remained suspicious and scrutinized this data with concern and skepticism, sometimes asking her husband to check her conclusions. As 1960 turned to 1961, Kelsey's continual requests for more information incurred the ire of her contact at Richardson-Merrell, who insisted on speeding up the approval process and attempted to escalate the application, but Kelsey's superiors at the FDA stood by her.

Kelsey's insistence that the drug should be fully tested prior to approval was vindicated in November 1961 when the births of deformed infants in Europe were linked to thalidomide ingestion by their mothers during pregnancy. Researchers discovered that the thalidomide crossed the placental barrier and caused serious birth defects. In March 1962, after distributing "experimental" tablets to tens of thousands of patients without approval (causing 17 malformed births), Richardson-Merrell at last withdrew their FDA application. Kelsey was hailed on the front page of The Washington Post as a heroine for averting a large-scale tragedy in the U.S. Morton Mintz, author of The Washington Post article, said "[Kelsey] prevented ... the birth of hundreds or indeed thousands of armless and legless children." Kelsey insisted that her assistants, Oyama Jiro and Lee Geismar, as well as her FDA superiors who backed her strong stance, deserved credit as well. The narrative of Kelsey's persistence was used to help pass rigorous drug approval regulation in 1962.

After Mintz broke the story in July 1962, there was a substantial public outcry. The Kefauver Harris Amendment was passed unanimously by Congress in October 1962 to strengthen drug regulation. Companies were required to demonstrate the efficacy of new drugs, report adverse reactions to the FDA, and request consent from patients participating in clinical studies. The drug testing reforms required "stricter limits on the testing and distribution of new drugs" to avoid similar problems. The amendments, for the first time, also recognized that "effectiveness [should be] required to be established prior to marketing."

As a result of her blocking American approval of thalidomide, Kelsey was awarded the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by John F. Kennedy on August 7, 1962, becoming the second woman so honoured. After receiving the award, Kelsey continued her work at the FDA. There, she played a key role in shaping and enforcing the 1962 amendments. She was named Director of the Investigational Drug Branch.

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