Fetal Outcome from Prolonged Versus Acute Drug Administration in the Pregnant Rat

Abstract

Eleven years ago last May (1), our distinguished opening lecturer, Dr. Josef Warkany, called to order the first meeting of the Teratology Society of the USA in Cleveland, Ohio. He did this after years of work in the field of pediatrics and experimental teratology, observing many malformed children in his clinical practice. At that time, he requested that workers in other areas of biomedical sciences join in the search for the causes of congenital malformation and the mode of action of the causative agents as an approach to the prevention and cure of such malformation. Nine years later (2), at the close of the Third International Conference on Congenital Malformations, he expressed his satisfaction in seeing “so many talented investigators, representative of so many sciences, turn to this once neglected field of medicine” and emphasized that “our aim must be the prevention of congenital malformations”. At the present, as in 1969, we are still at the beginning of preventive teratology; however, since 1961, the time of our first meeting, there is an ever-increasing number of scientists aware of the problems of congenital malformations. This awareness was probably brought about by the teratogenic effects of thalidomide. But thalidomide or not, such an incident was bound to happen with our constant development of new drugs to combat diseases that plague mankind.