The Iron Lung That Made a Drug-Safety Rebel-and a Missing Memo

Healthcare Scandal Investigations · Jul 22, 2026 · 19m

The Iron Lung That Made a Drug-Safety Rebel-and a Missing Memo

A Cambridge medical student spent nearly two years sealed inside an iron lung in the early 1950s, later delivering fifty babies from an adapted wheelchair and building a national drug safety system after thalidomide crippled thousands; yet a corporate memo decades later claimed he had destroyed his own review records-what really happened to those files?

In this episode, we trace his life from Banstead to Cambridge and through a career that moved from hospital wards to the heart of Britain’s drug-safety apparatus, asking how a man…