1.1 Following the thalidomide tragedy, a Royal Commission was set up in March 1973 to examine and report on the circumstances in which anyone suffering personal injury should be entitled to compensation and on the amount, the form and the source of such compensation. The Commission also considered the extent to which dependants should be compensated for losses which they incurred arising from the injury or death of a victim. The Commission, whose chairman was Lord Pearson, took written evidence from 766 organizations or persons and oral evidence from 113. The Report of the Commission, published in March 1978, was in three volumes comprising in all 1,084 pages. Volume 2 (259 pages) contained detailed statistical information which had been produced from various sources. It is known that in many cases information had to be assembled from inadequate data, and the Commission pointed out that many of the figures were a matter of judgment. They ascribed degrees of reliability to each table, but in some cases they were probably over-optimistic. Volume 3 (280 pages) reported on practice overseas.