I only ever met Bill McBride twice.

The first time was only for around a minute after waiting to interview him for the now defunct National Times. He apologised that he was too busy and couldn't do the interview.

Dr McBride in the early 1960s at a maternity hospital in Blakehurst, Sydney. ( Keystone-France/Getty Images )

The second time was in a mediation being conducted by a former judge, over an article I'd written in the Fairfax press. Neither enabled me to know the man.

But his name was one that I first heard very early in my career. Dr McBride — who died on Wednesday — was Sydney's society gynaecologist; I was a new paediatric registrar at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Sydney.

I'd arrived from London and was seeking advice from my fellow registrars about what rotations I should request to get the most out of my training.

They all strongly recommended against going to Crown Street Women's Hospital, which is now an apartment complex.

"It's a nightmare," they said. "A one-on-one roster." (In other words, you were on call without a break, day and night, for six weeks.)

They also mentioned an obstetrician called Bill McBride, who had a reputation for making the registrars' lives difficult. Some spoke about having to ventilate babies who were delivered unnecessarily pre-term.

"And not only that," they said. "He claims to have discovered that thalidomide caused birth abnormalities when it was actually the sister on the post-natal ward."

The role of Sister Sparrow

I never went to Crown Street and never forgot those words. And when I started out in journalism, I learned more about Dr McBride.

His reputation rested on a short letter to the Lancet in the early 60s asking if anyone else had noticed the problems he had observed in the babies of mothers who'd taken thalidomide for their nausea during pregnancy.

Elizabeth Buckle, 7, one of many children affected by the drug Thalidomide, painting at home. ( Getty Images: Paul Fievez/BIPs )

This was the first published notification of concern but the reality was indeed that a nurse at Crown Street — Sister Sparrow — had noticed a few babies being born with limb defects.

They were mostly, if not all, Dr McBride's patients and the only thing Sister Sparrow could put it down to was that Dr McBride had started prescribing thalidomide as an anti-nausea drug when the other obstetricians hadn't.

Dr McBride didn't accept her claims to begin with, but then did.

And the research which ultimately sounded the death knell for thalidomide was actually performed in Germany by geneticist and paediatrician Professor Widukind Lenz.

Dr McBride, on the other hand, was never trained in research — but yearned for recognition as a scientist. About 10 years after the Lancet letter, he received worldwide headlines for sounding the alarm over alleged birth defects caused by tricyclic antidepressants.

When eventually called to produce evidence, he had none.

A man of misplaced conviction

This pattern was repeated with another anti-nausea drug in pregnancy called Debendox, taken by around 30 million women with no evidence of harm.

Yet Dr McBride believed it caused limb defects and appeared in court cases against the manufacturer.

Eventually the company couldn't afford to keep running cases which, even though they always won, cost more than the drug was worth.

In one US case, Dr McBride was intensely cross-examined and his evidence found wanting. This was the beginning of his downfall, because he came back to Sydney to his own research organisation, Foundation 41, and ordered a study on a small number of rabbits.

The results were unusable. But when the paper was published, there were extra rabbits and changed doses. It made it look as though the medication had caused birth defects.

This was the story I ran on the Science Show on ABC Radio National in the late 1980s. It resulted in Dr McBride being struck off the medical register and for the first time forced Australian universities and funding agencies to create a scientific code of conduct to try to prevent and deal with scientific fraud.

I'm often asked, "What sort of person was Dr McBride?"

In the course of my research, I spoke to many people who had been hurt by him in some way.

They all described him as charming, as a likeable rogue, as charismatic and convincing — and always certain of the rightness of his position.

The story of William Griffith McBride is one of hubris that was never called to account by those who knew what he was up to.

It is a saga that snowballed, but which might have been controlled earlier in his career.

The responsibility for Dr McBride's downfall and sad end is shared by a medical profession that didn't confront what it knew to be wrong.

Norman Swan's 1987 program about research fraud by William McBride won the Australian Writers' Guild Award for best documentary and a Gold Walkley.