Category Archives: Viva!

CENSORED NEWS: My grandmother loved words

My grandmother loved words. She was a dirt farmer in the old south. Each day she would work the word puzzles in the newspaper, challenged and awakened by those words. At the turn of the Nineteenth Century, she received a college degree in English. But she returned to the land. She never cut her hair or said unkind words about others.

I aked her once if she could have been anything, what would it be. She said, ‘A cotton farmer, but the boll weevils ended that.’

It was words that took me out of the old south. It was words that took me out into the world.

It is words that can make peace or war. It is words that transform us into what we are becoming. Words awaken our spirits, they carry us forward.

Tonight when Peter Phillips of the Media Freedom Foundation threatened to sue me, claiming he owned the words ‘Censored News,’ I thought of my grandmother.

She lived in a different time and place, but she knew the power of words. She knew their beauty, she knew their resilience, and she knew that like the land and river water, no one can own the words.

via CENSORED NEWS: My grandmother loved words.

Frances Oldham Kelsey, F.D.A. Doctor Who Exposed Danger of Thalidomide, Dies at 101 – The New York Times

The sedative was Kevadon, and the application to market it in America reached the new medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration in September 1960. The drug had already been sold to pregnant women in Europe for morning sickness, and the application seemed routine, ready for the rubber stamp.

But some data on the drug’s safety troubled Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a former family doctor and teacher in South Dakota who had just taken the F.D.A. job in Washington, reviewing requests to license new drugs. She asked the manufacturer, the William S. Merrell Company of Cincinnati, for more information.

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Thus began a fateful test of wills. Merrell responded. Dr. Kelsey wanted more. Merrell complained to Dr. Kelsey’s bosses, calling her a petty bureaucrat. She persisted. On it went. But by late 1961, the terrible evidence was pouring in. The drug — better known by its generic name, thalidomide — was causing thousands of babies in Europe, Britain, Canada and the Middle East to be born with flipperlike arms and legs and other defects

via Frances Oldham Kelsey, F.D.A. Doctor Who Exposed Danger of Thalidomide, Dies at 101 – The New York Times.