The Change Mariner

For the first time an unknown performance-enhancing drug has been identified - How a new steroid was decoded

NYT

... In 21 years as director of the laboratory, Dr. Donald H. Catlin had never encountered a smoking gun like this. He had believed for several years that some athletes were cheating with impunity by using designer steroids, and now he had a chance to prove it.

Over the next three months, using high-tech screening devices and low-tech tools like pencil and paper, Dr. Catlin and a team of eight chemists cracked the chemical code of the steroid, tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, synthesized it and developed a test to catch those who used it.

The result has been a billowing scandal. Urine samples from five track athletes, including Regina Jacobs, the perennial top American women's miler, and Dwain Chambers, Britain's top sprinter, who trains in California, have shown THG in preliminary tests, according to officials familiar with the results. The athletes did not knowingly take a prohibited substance, their lawyers have said.

The federal authorities are investigating a nutritional supplement company, the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, or Balco, which one anti-doping official called the likely source of the steroid. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have been issued to baseball stars like Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, and reportedly to dozens of other athletes including various professional football players, the boxer Shane Mosley and the sprinter Marion Jones.

A lawyer for one of the athletes said the authorities were investigating the sale and distribution of THG, along with possible tax evasion by Balco. Victor Conte, Balco's president, has denied being the source of the THG.

Apparently for the first time in a game of pharmacological cat and mouse that has spanned four decades, an unknown performance-enhancing drug has been identified, a test for it has been developed and urine samples have been re-examined before any athletes who might have used the drug were aware that the authorities knew the steroid existed.

It has left the scientists who detected THG with a bittersweet sense of enormous accomplishment and dread.

"It's really nice to be able to solve an important, complex problem," Dr. Catlin, 65, a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology, said in a telephone interview.

Posted by Norm M. Wada at November 2, 2003 12:31 PM | TrackBack
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