"On October 29, 1959, the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle filed an application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to license their drug Enovid for use as an oral contraceptive. Less than a decade after birth control activist Margaret Sanger first told scientist Gregory Pincus about her hopes for a "magic pill," it appeared that success was imminent. The trials presented in the application for FDA approval of Enovid as an oral contraceptive were the largest drug trials ever run. In the trials, 897 women had taken 10,427 cycles of the Pill with no side effects the doctors considered harmful. In 1959 the main hurdle to FDA approval for any new drug was that it be proven safe. Effica-cy was not yet a requirement. Since the FDA had already reviewed the issue of safety when it approved Enovid's use for menstrual disorders in 1957, Searle assumed the application would glide through the process. Searle and the Pill researchers were soon disappointed. The FDA sat on the application, and months went by without any word. Safety wasn't the issue clogging up the review process. It was the revolutionary nature of the Pill itself. Oral contraceptives would be the first drugs whose purpose was not to cure a medical ailment. Instead, the Pill would be given to healthy women for long-term use for a social purpose, and the FDA was uncomfortable with the concept."