ONE OF the big questions about the drug thalidomide was why the birth defects that affected thousands of babies in the 1950s did not show up in tests on mice. Now the compound that protected mice has been identified, and could lead to safer versions of the drug, which has been rehabilitated as a powerful anti-cancer agent.
, now at the University of Cologne in Germany, and his colleagues wanted to know what made mouse embryos immune to the harmful side effects that plague human and chicken embryos.
They discovered that chicken and human embryos exposed to…
