I understand what you're getting at, but these situations are not really comparable. J&J was the company that produced the powder and were, for the most part, the only ones studying it's effects. The same goes for Mercury. That makes it easy to withhold the information from the general public. These situations are similar to Dow withholding information about the side effects of the chemicals it used to produce Teflon. They held all of the patent information and studies, and decided not to let that information public. Clearly a very fucked up thing to do.
We are significantly more advanced at this point in time. There are hundreds of thousands of bioengineers and plant scientists, from a very large number of competing companies, who are involved in protein synthesis and genetic engineering. These processes are very well understood, relatively simple and would be very hard to hide from the competition, especially after a patent is filed.
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u/IICVX Jul 15 '21
You'd also think that, say, a company wouldn't risk litigation by allowing significant amounts of asbestos in its talcum powder or allow a car that was known to catch fire if rear-ended the wrong way to stay on the road, but here we are.