
A Drug Hits Cycling Before It Hits the Market - lemaudit
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/sports/cycling/fabio-taborre-and-carlos-oyarzun-drug-tests-suggest-use-of-chemical-meant-for-research.html
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angdis
Blood samples, I believe, can be stored cryogenically for some period of time
and evaluated at a future date using tests/techniques not yet developed at the
time the sample was originally drawn.

The efficacy of all this depends on having a rock-solid chain-of-custody for
the blood samples-- just like evidence used for a criminal court. Not easy.

~~~
friendzis
Freezing tends to damage (amount of damage depends on freezing techniques)
hydrophilic cells, so basically anything organic. Even frozen tissue still
deteriorates to some degree. Which means that not only new techniques for drug
discovery have to be devised, but more importantly, techniques to account for
deterioration and change in chemical structure. You really don't want someone
who did sleep at that microscope for past 5 minutes to yell "this seems
familiar to compound x" and have your titles removed at the blink of an eye.

~~~
bhickey
You may be oversimplifying here. I can't speak to Eukaryotes, but Prokaryotes
are routinely flash frozen in liquid nitrogen and then stored for years at
-80. Gently thaw them out and they're happy to go on reproducing.

For the purposes of a drug test, your requirements are even looser. I don't
see why you'd need or care about lysing your cells. A test is only going to be
screening for small molecules, so destroying organelles and lysing cells
should be largely irrelevant.

~~~
friendzis
I'm no chemist/biologist by education (happen to touch the field from time to
time) and I am oversimplifying, but the point I wanted to stress is that the
delayed test results largely depend on what are you searching for: something
that is unnatural to human body or something that is naturally
occurring/produced by human body. And unless you have extremely highly
controlled test procedures and account for any changes to specimen caused by
the test process, including but not limited to storage, then well... you have
a biased test. That's scientific testing 101. Yes, sometimes this bias can be
safely ignored, but I'm of no competence to tell if drug testing
positive/negative results differ by a margin large enough.

AFAIK, even flash frozen and gently thawed prokaryotes do not have 100%
survive rate and eukaryote survive rate is considerably lower. My comment
revolves around the idea that biochemical reactions have pretty strict
requirements on conditions for happening at all, while chemical reactions are
much looser in this regard. Even 99.999% survivability calls for scientific
research on structural/biochemical/chemical change prior to using such
techniques for anything touching legal system with anything shorter than ten
foot pole. IMHO. Happy to be corrected.

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amelius
> Athletes have gotten banned drugs from websites in China, he said, but what
> they receive is not always what they tried to order.

I guess this happens to millions of people every day, ordering drugs online
through the internet.

~~~
nwatson
Actually, apparently those who order [medically purposed] drugs online through
spam solicitations generally end up getting what they order. NPR has done a
couple of stories on this, and I can't find the best link now, but here's one
NPR story (from Planet Money) about online spam drug stores largely meeting
their commitments:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/01/11/168967999/black...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/01/11/168967999/black-
market-pharmacies-and-the-big-business-of-spam)

edit: qualified for "medical" drugs (those meant for medical conditions)
instead of enhancement-performing drugs

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roymurdock
This is another reason why I've stopped watching baseball and will probably
never follow competitive cycling, even though I enjoy cycling myself.

What's the point of the competition when a good portion of the top athletes
are doping? It's not a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and
asphalt.

The real spectacle is now between the athletes, regulators, lawyers, coaches.
I see no romance/art in watching them chase money and evidence around.

~~~
Retra
Personally, I don't see any reason to be bothered by doping; it's just another
form of performance technology. To me, it isn't any different from eating a
high-protein diet. Or having a genetic anomaly that makes your muscles
slightly more efficient.

They chase money and evidence around precisely because people like you will
stop caring if they can't prevent doping. You draw a (very arbitrary) line
between 'natural' and 'unnatural' athletes, and you create a market for goon
squads to hunt down the unnaturals to preserve the purity of the culture.

It never was a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt. It's
also a contest of means, luck, money, food, biology, and genetics. Even
without the doping.

~~~
roymurdock
I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to dope if they want to. Nor
am I arguing that unnatural or transhumanist athletes should be "hunted down"
by goon squads.

I'm arguing that athletes who perform in games and competitions must follow
the rules of these games and competitions, or else what is the point of having
the structured organization of a sport? No one would care about the Tour de
France if it wasn't assumed that the athletes were all following the same set
of rules. Athletes who dope should play in their own league, with their own
set of rules.

I agree: the line between different performance enhancing technologies is
blurred. I'm not trying to pass judgment on whether taking steroids is more or
less "wrong" than following a high-protein diet.

All I can comment on is my decline in interest given the shaky boundaries and
clearly unethical actions of the top layer of these sports.

~~~
Retra
That's a good point. The ethical behavior of top athletes is disappointing.

On the other hand, if you're going to pay them so much to win, it will
naturally be worth the risk to lie and cheat to do it.

~~~
roymurdock
Yup, I think professional athletes are overpaid.

Unfortunately I am but one individual in the greater market of people who
determine athlete salary by attending games, sitting in front of the TV, and
buying endorsed products.

I do love to watch a good old Federer v Djokovic match every once in a while
though ;)

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Nexxxeh
I'd be nervous about the 98% purity. What makes up the other 2%?

I mean if they're making stuff that is designed to alter your production of
red blood cells, is that 2% of stuff likely to be inert or be stuff that has
an effect on you?

What's the usual purity percentage of say, OTC aspirin?

~~~
task_queue
By products of the process, left over reagents, whatever was used to extract
or separate the product in question. Think heavy metals, intermediates and a
lot of mystery chemicals.

It's not FDA approved and probably made in lab with the same stringent quality
controls as the clandestine ones in China pumping out similar things.

The 98% purity thing shows that they weren't willing to put in the extra
investment to run enough solvent washes / whatever to not poison their
customers.

~~~
Thriptic
A research compound doesn't need to be 100% pure. It's not meant for human
use.

~~~
phkahler
>> A research compound doesn't need to be 100% pure. It's not meant for human
use.

Then why does it come in pill form? And why do they only sell it to
researchers - including those doing clinical trials?

~~~
benchtobedside
The compound mentioned in the source article, FG-4592, is delivered in a
powder form [1], not a pill.

It is available to researchers as they are able to use it in non-human assays,
experiments and studies.

[1]
[https://www.caymanchem.com/app/template/Product.vm/catalog/1...](https://www.caymanchem.com/app/template/Product.vm/catalog/15294)

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at-fates-hands
It looks as though the UCI has finally caught up wit the dopers. For decades,
the cycling teams were always two or three steps ahead of UCI testing methods.

Good to see they're developing the means to uncover these new drugs before
they become widely used.

~~~
fartbrain
bahahahhahaha no.

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profinger
How do these drug tests work? I was under the impression that drug tests only
found things that they were looking for. How did they know to be looking for
this new drug? I'm googling to try to figure it out but maybe someone is
familiar with this process?

~~~
mitchell_h
Drug tests don't actually look for drugs. They look for deviations from normal
in your body's chemistry.

~~~
angdis
It depends. Floyd Landis was pinched by a test performed on a mass
spectrometer !

~~~
rjsw
Maybe. Part of the reason that he contested it for so long was that although
he had doped he had not actually taken anything that would produce the
reported result.

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Cantremeber
I'm not too surprised at this. Recreational drug users have been doing this
for years. I'd guess they are likely getting any number of not yet illegal
stimulants like this too.

