Pecuniary gain, when stretched past the altruistic; carried through the protestant means to salvation and, past Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ hypothesis; usually ends up at the other extreme of Hobbesian callousness, as portrayed by Orson Welles’ penicillin diluting character in The Third man. In light of the Volkswagen scandal, where software was surreptitiously installed to generate false, in-specification,

results when the automobile was tested for emissions, it is prudent to examine whether a similar stratagem can be applied to the testing of pharmaceutical excipients (and APIs’).