It protected us from thalidomide, but its slow and careful ways may be killing cancer patients.
The trust fund was set up in 1973 by Distillers - whose subsidiary made Thalidomide.
But a lot of Thalidomide victims are dependent on home helps and 24-hour care.
Now on the market for treating that rarer cancer, Revlimid costs twice as much as thalidomide.
It took five years before an Australian obstetrician, William McBride, traced deformities in children to thalidomide.
Thalidomide's success drew researchers and drug makers into the hunt for even more treatments.
Her only hope was to take part in Dr Siow Ming Lee's Thalidomide tests at Middlesex Hospital.
Mrs Edwards now has to take one tablet of Thalidomide every night for the next two years.
In 1991 Barer came across work done at Rockefeller University that linked thalidomide to profound anti-inflammatory properties.
Thalidomide was famously pulled as a sleeping pill in 1962, after it was associated with birth defects.
Thalidomide was discovered by accident in 1954 by chemists in Germany who were trying to produce an anti-histamine.
Lapper was born almost without arms and very short legs - disabilities similar to those caused by Thalidomide.
The story of thalidomide is a sorry tale of corporate greed, institutional inadequacy, unnecessary suffering and cruel irony.
My left arm is a short stub with a small hand and three fingers, reminiscent of a thalidomide defect.
There have also been reports of thalidomide defects from Mexico, India, and Africa.
On the phone he suddenly hatched a radical idea: Why not try thalidomide?
After all, thalidomide is still used as a treatment for multiple myeloma (a plasma cell cancer) and leprosy.
Historically, it was a reminder of how the thalidomide nightmare helped shape the current environment in specific practical ways.
Thalidomide has outgrown its destructive early days to become a useful weapon in the fight against almost 130 diseases.
While its future may be bright, thalidomide's past is too awful to repeat.
Over the next eight years Celgene quadrupled the price of thalidomide, bringing it in line with other effective cancer pills.
Called Thalidomide Pharmion, it is an adaptation of the infamous antinausea drug banned in the 1960s for causing birth defects.
There are a lot of people damaged by thalidomide struggling with health problems in the UK and around the world.
Celgene scientists still don't know exactly how thalidomide works, only that it is extremely effective at stopping the malignant cells.
Velcade, approved in 2003, and Revlimid, a thalidomide successor approved in 2006, are now backbones of myeloma treatment, doctors say.
Thalidomide works, in part, by blocking the production of tumour necrosis factor-alpha, a biochemical which promotes inflammation in the body.
One of them codenamed cc1088 has been found in laboratory studies to be far more potent than thalidomide itself at quelling inflammation.
Freddie Astbury, chairman of Thalidomide UK, said the families had been assured that the side-effects would not occur in their children.
The German manufacturer of Thalidomide continues to be vilified a half century after its birth defect disaster of the early 1960s.
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There are thought to be 456 surviving Thalidomide victims currently living in the UK with disabilities ranging from minor to severe defects.
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