The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies

Joshua Lev Krieger; Tom  Nicholas; Matthew  Preble

Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2017

The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies

by Joshua Lev Krieger, Tom Nicholas and Matthew Preble

Abstract

In the early 1960s, a popular drug taken by patients worldwide for a range of maladies was found to cause severe birth defects and other health problems in babies born to mothers who had taken it during a certain stage of fetal development. As many as 10,000 children may have been affected. Just a handful of these children were born in the U.S., where safety concerns were raised by Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the medical officer handling the thalidomide application at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. However, the company hoping to distribute the product in the U.S. had already given away thousands of pills for doctors to run clinical trials. Once the full extent of the global thalidomide crisis became generally known, the U.S. Congress significantly reformed the country’s drug approval process to ensure that all new products were both safe and effective. It subsequently became much more arduous for pharmaceutical firms to bring new drugs to market. Some critics therefore argued that the new regulations were actually detrimental, as they prevented or delayed good drugs from coming to market. What was the right balance between consumer protection and access to potentially life-saving drugs?

Keywords: regulation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business History; Health; Government Legislation; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Pharmaceutical Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Australia; Germany; Europe;

Language: English

Format: Print

28 pages

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Citation:

Krieger, Joshua Lev, Tom Nicholas, and Matthew Preble. "The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies." Harvard Business School Case 818-044, November 2017.

This is a course overview note for The Coming of Managerial Capitalism. CMC is chronologically organized. It starts in the late eighteenth century when America gained independence, spans the remarkable rise to industrial maturity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ends at the crossroads at which the United States currently stands. There are four modules: 1) THE HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP 2) THE EMERGENCE OF ORGANIZATION 3) PROSPERITY, DEPRESSION AND WAR 4) TECHNOLOGICAL AND FINANCIAL REVOLUTIONS. Each covers a distinct period in business history but the themes overlap and these themes are collectively analyzed in a concluding session LESSONS FROM THE PAST. CMC is motivated by the idea that effective decision making in the current business environment crucially relies on a comprehensive appreciation of how things worked—or didn't work—in the past.

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019

Wayfair

Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Matthew Preble

In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual imagery, which has traditionally been generated not by the retail channel rather than by manufacturers. Catalog retailers, in particular, are famous for visually romancing the category. As a comprehensive offering, Wayfair hosts over seven million SKUs on its site, so it must solve for the lack of visual assets from manufacturers by generating visual assets of its own. Initially, the company embarks on a plan to produce these images using traditional photography studios and professional staffs, but costs mount and throughput is too slow. Seeking a solution, Shah and Conine assess the likelihood of using technology – specifically, high-resolution 3D modeling from low-resolution 2D images – to address the challenge. Resolving this issue is especially pressing, given that Wayfair has just launched private label lines and a host of what it calls lifestyle brands, which require support from high-end visual merchandising. As a consequence, the question of how to provision visual assets becomes a question of how fast Wayfair can grow. This case presents the factors involved in deciding what direction to take – a reliable path using traditional methods or a risky path using bleeding-edge technologies.

Keywords: visual assets; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Decision Making; Business or Company Management; Growth Management; Innovation and Invention; Operations; Strategy; Technology; Retail Industry; Service Industry; United States; Massachusetts;

Citation:

Rayport, Jeffrey F., Susie Ma, and Matthew Preble. "Wayfair." Harvard Business School Case 819-045, April 2019. View Details

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