NEWS OF THE WEEK
SUITS TARGET BAYER SCHERING COURT CASE: Claimants say 1970s-era pregnancy test drug caused birth defects
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AYER SCHERING PHARMA is facing lawsuits in
German courts regarding a pregnancy test drug called Duogynon. Claimants allege that the drug, a mixture of progesterone and an estrogen derivative, caused birth defects in babies born in the 1970s to women who took it. The test was taken off the German and U.K. markets in 1980. The new suits come some 30 years after parents of children with birth defects lost several cases against Schering, the German company that marketed the
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These two chemicals make up the drug Duogynon.
NANOREDUCTION OF GRAPHENE OXIDE MATERIALS: Scanning probe
SCIENCE/AAAS
This artistic rendering depicts a process in which a heated probe tip reduces nanoscale regions of graphene oxide to graphene (chicken wire).
method patterns insulator with conducting features
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RAPHENE OXIDE, an oxidized form of the
advanced carbon material graphene, can be controllably reduced by passing a heated atomic force microscope (AFM) tip over the material, according to a report published in Science by an international team of researchers (2010, 328, 1373). The procedure provides a way to pattern the relatively easy-to-prepare nonconducting material with nanosized conducting lines and other features—an advance that may hasten its implementation in nanoscale circuitry. Graphene’s outstanding electrical conductivity and mechanical strength have made this atomically thin form of carbon a much-studied material for nanoscale electronics applications. Graphene oxide, which can be prepared readily via the 150-year-old WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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drug. Schering is now part of Bayer Schering Pharma. At the time, reports both supporting and questioning connections between the pregnancy test and birth defects were published in leading journals such as Nature. André Sommer, a 34-year-old schoolteacher in Germany, recently told Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, that the Duogynon his mother took caused his malformed genitalia and misplaced bladder. Sommer is one of the first of about 30 individuals that Jörg Heynemann, a Berlin-based medical malpractice lawyer, aims to represent in lawsuits against Bayer Schering Pharma. In Germany, class action suits are not allowed, so people who wish to sue a company must do so individually. Heynemann estimates that 1,000 people say Duogynon or Primodos, a similar product marketed in the U.K., caused birth defects such as malformed genitalia, heart defects, and spina bifida. “This is the forgotten thalidomide,” Heynemann says. The lawsuit is requesting that Bayer Schering Pharma release toxicological data about Duogynon that has not yet been made public. Heynemann says his eventual aim is to secure financial compensation for his clients. “We don’t see a basis for the request” to release the toxicological data, says Oliver Renner, a Bayer Schering Pharma spokesman. In a written statement, the company says there is “no causality between the product and the birth defects. The topic has been fully analyzed in the past from a scientific as well as a jurisdictional point of view.”—SARAH EVERTS
technique of treating bulk graphite with strong oxidizers, is sometimes used as a starting material for making sheets of graphene. The oxidized material, which contains hydroxyl, epoxide, and carbonyl groups, can be treated with potent reducing agents such as hydrazine or heated strongly (to 1,100 °C in some procedures) to yield graphene. Now, Paul E. Sheehan, a chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.; physicist Elisa Riedo of Georgia Institute of Technology; and coworkers in the U.S., South Korea, and France have shown that by using a heated AFM tip, they can selectively reduce regions of graphene oxide as narrow as 12 nm and can control the extent of reduction and thereby customize the reduced regions’ electronic properties. The reduced sections, which differ from pristine graphene in that they contain residual oxygen and various structural defects, are up to 10,000 times more electrically conductive than the surrounding regions, the team says. They add that the reduction process can be automated by using arrays of independently controlled probe tips. Northwestern University graphene specialist Jiaxing Huang notes that the procedure may enable graphene circuits to be “written” directly on graphene oxide sheets. He adds that further study is needed, however, to ensure that the graphene oxide matrix remains oxidized and does not spontaneously, if slowly, undergo reduction and cause short circuiting.—MITCH JACOBY
JUNE 14, 2010
