Re: Another One
This is kind of a tired question. As was previously mentioned, Truman made this call. He went to his deathbed believing it was the right thing to do.
The argument that "the job of a scientist is to discover the truth" is a classic case of forest-for-the-trees. The job of the drug scientist is to save lives or at least improve the quality of life. Anything else is science for the sake of science. It is plain to see that on average, suppressing the evidence will save significantly more lives. Even if you want to take the cynical (and juvenile IMO) view that the job of the drug scientist is to make money, it will lead you to the same answer.
Making a decision to kill some number of innocents to save a larger number of innocents is a textbook example of conservatism, or at least pragmatism. This same discussion can be found in the death penalty argument. One side considers the death of one wrongly convicted person a total failure of the system. The other side considers it to be the cost of saving the lives that would be lost were the threat of death not there to deter potential killers. Collateral damage, if you will.
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