Heinrich Mückter (14 June 1914 – 22 May 1987) was a German medical doctor, pharmacologist and chemist.

World War II

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Mückter was deputy director of the Kraków Institute for Typhus and Virus Research. Mückter and his colleagues repeatedly experimented on

concentration camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simpl ...

prisoners in

Buchenwald Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or sus ...

. Many prisoners died as a result of the experiments. Accused by Polish war crimes prosecutors of conducting medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners and Nazi forced labourers, Mückter escaped arrest and fled back to Germany.

Invention of thalidomide

In 1946 Mückter became Head of Research at the

Grünenthal Grünenthal is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Aachen in Germany. It was founded in 1946 as Chemie Grünenthal and has been continuously family-owned. The company was the first to introduce penicillin into the German market in the ...

pharmaceutical company, where he developed the infamous drug

thalidomide Thalidomide, sold under the brand names Contergan and Thalomid among others, is a medication used to treat a number of cancers (including multiple myeloma), graft-versus-host disease, and a number of skin conditions including complications o ...

. Aggressively-marketed as an over-the-counter sleeping pill and remedy for morning sickness in pregnancy, thalidomide was first made available on 1 October 1957, and it became the second best-selling medication in Germany after Bayer Aspirin. Thalidomide was eventually found to cause miscarriages, severe birth defects in babies whose mothers had taken the medication while pregnant, and severe nerve damage. In January 1968, Mückter was put on trial along with other Grünenthal employees. The trial ended abruptly in April 1970 with a settlement. Mückter was never charged in relation to his role in experiments on concentration camp prisoners, nor his role in the thalidomide scandal. He died on 22 May 1987.

References

1914 births 1987 deaths German pharmacologists 20th-century German chemists {{Nazi Germany-stub