NIH knew drug could cause fatal brain disease, newspaper reports. Before there was synthetic growth hormone, human growth hormone extracted from the pituitaries of cadavers was used to treat growth hormone deficiency from 1963 and 1985. The program was ended because of accumulating deaths from Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), one of several gruesome incurable fatal diseases with long incubation periods (kuru, sheep scrapie and “mad cow disease”, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy [BSE] are others) thought to be caused by mysterious, minute transmissible agents called prions. A new report alleges that, despite warnings, the NIH for seven years ignored signs that a more costly extraction technique with more intensive filtering was necessary to insure the safety of the cadaveric hormone.