Isabel Gal

Isabel Gal (1925 - 2017), was a Jewish Hungarian paediatrician who was responsible for highlighting the link between use of the hormonal pregnancy test Primodos and severe birth defects.

Early life and education Born in Hungary in 1926, Isabel was the daughter of Geza Gunsberger, a merchant from Papa, Hungary, and Irma Hacker, from Austria. Gunsberger worked first for a timber merchant and later founded a lingerie company. During the Holocaust, Gunsberger was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. He later died in Buchenwald concentration camp. Isabel, along with her mother and sisters, Erica and Lia, were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, all four survived the war.

In 1953, she married Endre Gal, a mathematician, whose father was a timber merchant who Isabel's father had previously worked for, and in 1956 the couple's daughter Katinka was born. and as a clinical lecturer at the Institute of Obstetrics and Genealogy, at Imperial College London. Throughout her career Gal published extensively on pregnancy tests, oral contraceptives and vitamin A.

Primodos In 1967, while working at Queen Mary's Hospital for Children, Gal published an article in the journal Nature, highlighting a potential link between the hormone-based pregnancy test Primodos, manufactured by German drug company Schering AG, and congenital birth malformations. Gal found that from a group of 100 women who had babies born with spina bifida, 19 had taken Primodos, whereas in a control group of 100 women with healthy babies, only four had used the drug. She hypothesised that the high dose of hormone in the pregnancy test, might have interfered with the foeto-placental unit. It was not until 1975, when further evidence emerged supporting her findings, that the Committee on Safety of Medicines issued a warning about use of the drug, One reason for this inaction was that the government did not want to discourage women from taking the newly available oral contraceptive pill. In a 1997 book, Bill Inman who had been Senior Medical Officer at the UK Department of Health and Social Security at the time and who corresponded with Gal about her findings, wrote:

in 2017, Inman was found to have destroyed documents relating to the case.

Later life and death Later in life Gal lived with her husband Endre in Teddington, south west London. She died in 2017 at the age of 92.

Media Thames Television produced a documentary titled The Primodos Affair in 1980, and in 2020, Sky News produced a documentary titled Bitter Pill: Primodos, which highlighted Gal's role in identifying the dangers of the drug.