When Laura was growing up in a small New England town, her parents and doctors worried that her predicted adult height threatened her future happiness. Laura's tall mother had been teased and embarrassed about her own height at school. When the local paediatrician mentioned that a specialist might be able to stunt Laura's growth and spare her the social pain of towering over boys as an adolescent and men as an adult, her family agreed. A paediatric endocrinologist affiliated with a prestigious US academic medical centre confidently prescribed the synthetic oestrogen diethylstilbestrol in doses 100 times greater than the oestrogen found in today's high-dose oral contraceptives.
Laura obediently took the little coated pills, now commonly known as DES, for about 2 years. But they made her sick and when she reached adulthood and married, she experienced miscarriage after miscarriage that denied her what she most wanted in life—children. When doctors also diagnosed her with a condition that put her at risk of breast cancer, Laura wondered what effects the little pills might have had on her adult health. She didn't know at the time that other tall girls also went on to have reproductive problems after taking diethylstilbestrol and other high-dose oestrogens to stunt their growth, or that there had been concerns about the drug's potential effects on fertility and cancer even at the time her physician prescribed it. Laura didn't know because none of the physicians she consulted as an adult had heard of the treatment she had received as a child; there had been hardly any follow-up studies of these girls once they became adults.