<P> In the United Kingdom, the drug was licensed in 1958 and withdrawn in 1961 . Of the approximately 2,000 babies born with defects, around half died within a few months and 466 survived to at least 2010 . </P> <P> In Spain, thalidomide was widely available throughout the 1970s, perhaps even into the 1980s . There were two reasons for this . First, state controls and safeguarding were poor; indeed, it was not until 2008 that the government even admitted the country had ever imported thalidomide . Second, Grünenthal failed to insist that its sister company in Madrid warn Spanish doctors, and permitted it to not warn them . The Spanish advocacy group for victims of thalidomide estimates that in 2015, there were 250--300 living victims of thalidomide in Spain . </P> <P> The Australian obstetrician William McBride and the German paediatrician Widukind Lenz suspected a link between birth defects and the drug, a theory Lenz proved in 1961 . McBride was later awarded a number of honors, including a medal and prize money by L'Institut de la Vie in Paris . Further animal tests were conducted by Dr George Somers, Chief Pharmacologist of Distillers Company in Britain, which showed foetal abnormalities in rabbits . Similar results were also published showing these effects in rats and other species . </P> <P> In East Germany, the head of the central pharmacy control commission, Friedrich Jung, suspected an antivitaminic effect of thalidomide as derivative of glutamic acid . Meanwhile, in West Germany, it took some time before the increase in dysmelia at the end of the 1950s was connected with thalidomide . In 1958 Karl Beck, a former pediatric doctor in Bayreuth wrote an article in a local newspaper claiming a relationship between nuclear weapons testing and cases of dysmelia in children . Based on this, FDP whip Erich Mende requested an official statement from the federal government . For statistical reasons, the main data series used to research dysmelia cases started by chance at the same time as the approval date for thalidomide . After the Nazi regime with its Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring used mandatory statistical monitoring to commit various crimes, western Germany had been very reluctant to monitor congenital disorders in a similarly strict way . The parliamentary report rejected any relation with radioactivity and the abnormal increase of dysmelia . Also the DFG research project installed after the Mende request was not helpful . The project was led by pathologist Franz Büchner who ran the project to propagate his teratological theory . Büchner saw lack of healthy nutrition and behavior of the mothers as being more important than genetic reasons . Furthermore, it took a while to install a Surgeon General in Germany; the Federal Ministry of Health (Germany) was not founded until 1962, some months after thalidomide was banned from the market . In Germany approximately 2,500 thalidomide babies were born . </P>

Who discovered the link between thalidomide and birth defects