anxiousmom: I think you unintentionally fell to the Recency Illusion.
The snakeoil industry was a major industry during the Gilded Age, as surely you must recall. Remember when Coca Cola with its cocaine was marketed as medicine?
The FDA was set up to combat an ill that had affected American society for centuries ... not because mad scientists wanted to try out their new biochemicals on an unsuspecting society. Charlatans had been doing that for a long time -- especially charlatans who weren't experimenting -- they just put in a bunch of weird solutions, knowing they wouldn't work and sold them as medicine. At least mad scientists would *try* to make them work...
I'd rather live in the age of mad pharmaceutical researchers than in an age when women took heroin to cure their "hysteria".
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Not having any science background of any sorts, it just boggled my mind that there are people out there paid to do such tedious research, then write paragraphs about what seems like such mundane things to me.
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Maybe it's a personality thing... it's something that would pique me, especially if the drug was not supposed to induce any sort of death, even in rats. I have this tendency to try to fully document every possibility, and it annoys some of my teachers when I write lab reports that are three times longer than my average classmate's.
I also take photographs of my cooking experiments and write blog reports about them. There's this great inner urge to fully document every variation possible. (If the ratio of milk to melted-sugar water were my independent variable, how would it affect the consistency of my custard? Now, what if I vary the proportion of eggs...?)