I frequently think about how the motivating event in the creation of the FDA had to do with a (self-educated) chemist who, while working for Massengill, made a children’s medicine deliberately sweetened with anti-freeze. After it killed some kids, he insisted it wasn’t poisonous, drank some to prove it, then immediate started making calls to find out what the treatment for drinking anti-freeze was…
(Mostly I think about it every time a libertarian claims we don’t need government regulation because markets are self-correcting…)
