page_title: Frances Oldham Kelsey
section_title: Early career
hierarchical_section_title: Frances Oldham Kelsey / Early career
caption_attribution_description: Dr. Frances O. Kelsey, pictured here in the 1960s, spent most of her career at FDA overseeing scientific investigations of drugs. For more information about FDA history visit www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/default.htm
context_page_description: Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey, CM was a Canadian-born American pharmacologist and physician. As a reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, she refused to authorize thalidomide for market because she had concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug's safety. Her concerns proved to be justified when it was shown that thalidomide caused serious birth defects. Kelsey's career intersected with the passage of laws strengthening FDA oversight of pharmaceuticals. Kelsey was the second woman to be awarded the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by President John F. Kennedy.
context_section_description: Upon completing her Ph.D., Oldham joined the University of Chicago faculty. In 1942, like many other pharmacologists, Oldham was looking for a synthetic cure for malaria. As a result of these studies, Oldham learned that some drugs are able to pass through the placental barrier. During her work, she also met fellow faculty member Fremont Ellis Kelsey, whom she married in 1943.
  While on the faculty at the University of Chicago, Kelsey was awarded her M.D. during 1950. She supplemented her teaching with work as an editorial associate for the American Medical Association Journal for two years. Kelsey left the University of Chicago in 1954, decided to take a position teaching pharmacology at the University of South Dakota, and moved with her husband and two daughters to Vermillion, South Dakota, where she taught until 1957.
  She became a dual citizen of Canada and the United States in the 1950s in order to continue practicing medicine in the U.S., but retained strong ties to Canada where she continued to visit her siblings regularly until late in life.
caption: Kelsey in the 1960s
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