Are you a professional pillow fighter or a 9-to-5 low-cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work related. And with monday.com, work is just easier. monday.com for whatever you run. Go to monday.com to learn more. Hello, and welcome to new books and sports. I'm your host, Bruce Berglin. For each episode of the podcast, we choose an interesting new book on some area of sports, and we interview the author of that book. This week's guest is biochemist Chris Cooper, head of research in sports and exercise science at the University of Essex. We're discussing his book, "Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat." The Science Behind Drugs in Sport, published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Just this past August, the long and convoluted story of doping allegations against Lance Armstrong came to its presumed end. Armstrong gave up the fight against charges that he had engaged in doping, while winning seven straight Tour de France titles. While Armstrong continues to maintain his innocence, and many people still believe him, the US Anti-Doping Agency has stripped the cyclist of his titles and banned him from competitions. But whether or not Armstrong did in fact dope, the evidence and accusations surrounding his story confirms that cycling of the late 90s and early 2000s, like women's track and field of the 1980s, or baseball of the 1990s, was inextricably tangled with performance enhancing drugs. Course in these cases, the question is often asked, how do we view the athletes and accomplishments from these tainted periods of sports history? Do we strip the titles and erase the records, or let them stand under the assumption that since nearly everybody was doing it, those athletes who won were simply the best of a dirty lot? Chris Cooper insists that before we make judgments about doping in sports, we need to understand how doping works in the blood and muscles of athletes. Are performance enhancing drugs truly unsafe to the health of athletes? And do they give a measurable advantage, an unfair advantage, to competitors who are doping? Chris addresses these questions in his book and in our interview. If you're like me, you've surely read plenty of sports writers' accounts of doping scandals. But after reading Chris's book and chatting with him about it, I now have a clear understanding of the issues surrounding performance enhancing drugs. Here's our interview. Our guest this week on New Books and Sports is Chris Cooper. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So by way of an introduction, I'll tell listeners that Chris is a biochemist who is a professor and head of research at the Center for Sports and Exercise Science at the University of Essex. And I'll ask you to start, Chris, by telling us what led you to bring these two interests together, biochemistry and sport. Well, as I've always been interested in sport and I have a biochemist and actually some of my research is now in the area of sport, not particularly about drugs. But I do work on an area where I try and create artificial blood for clinical reasons to replace blood transfusions. And that's one area of a sort of molecule that's banned in sport. So I've got a research interest indirectly in sport and in doping. But I also have a general interest. I mean, I teach a module of course to our undergraduate students at the University on Drugs and Sport. And somebody would say, well, why not just write a book and explore a property as a sort of slightly naive biochemist going into the whole area of drugs and sport and say, what's the research say, where are things now, where are they going to go in the future? One thing I enjoyed about the book is that you're clearly enthusiastic about new discoveries in the field in sport science. So can you give us a sketch of how you've seen the field develop over the last decade or two decades or so? I think it's starting to take on a much more modern way of looking at things. It's quite interesting. Sports has traditionally been very sort of physiology and psychology based, I guess, in the US and Canada. It's sort of called kinesiology, but the most sort of areas. And what's happening is a much more modern molecular techniques are coming into the sport science field. And that's really interesting. So I think rather bizarrely that biochemists were not doing looking at the whole body very often. They sort of forgot about the whole body. And the sport scientist sort of forgot about or didn't look at the individual molecules. And now those two expertise are coming together. It's quite an exciting time, really, in that biochemists are much more interested in the whole body. And sport scientists are much more interested in the individual molecules. So it's so much more synthetic. I mean, I think the concept is what's called generic or systems biology, systems physiology that sort of come together at the moment. And it's quite exciting time because of that. And is this being driven by athletes and trainers then? I think not particularly. I mean, driven by the scientists wanting to understand the basic science of what happens. And that requires you to the most modern techniques. I think the trainers are much more focused on the immediate effect. So I think I think as a sport scientist, I usually have a different time scale of sport to when I speak to athletes and coaches. I mean, I don't do too much work with coaches, but when I do, they want to know immediately what works now, power help me get the next level. And as a scientist, I tend to be looking at much more longer things. I have to have two mindsets, really. So let's turn to the book. And you begin the book with an episode that happened in 1988. And that was the the infamous final of the men's 100 meter sprint at the Seoul Olympics. So could you talk about that race and how how it was perhaps representative of athletics at the time? Yeah, well, I think not just at that time. I mean, that, yeah, in that particular race, I guess the sort of view is that Ben Johnson won in the super fast time. For those of you who don't remember, 9.73, the fastest time by a long way ever. And he was celebrating before he crossed the line. And that was an amazing event and certainly amazing event for Canada because he was a Canadian. But I guess the next morning, the world woke up to know the name Ben Johnson and because 100 meters sprinted on the blue ribbon event of the games. And then three days later, they woke up to know about the anabolic steroids because he was tested positive for anabolic steroids and therefore was had his gold medal taken away. Then there was a big inquiry in Canada into that. And subsequently, when you look at the athletes who competed in that event, very many of them were tainted by accusations or in some cases shown to have been taking performance in arts and drugs, in particular, anabolic steroids to increase their power of sprinting. So it was sort of a seminal event in drugs and sports because it was the men's 100 meters in the Olympic final. And it was won so fast. And although there was a bit around for a long time, and the public performance in arts and drugs were fairly common from the late '70s onwards, certainly in the '80s, that was the moment when the world grew up to know it. So I'll follow up on that and ask about the history of drugs and sports and what led us to that race in 1988. When and where did doping begin and why did it become so widespread? Well, it really depends what you mean by drugs and doping because I'd argue you'd go back in terms of the gladiators. They were taking certain herbs or things they thought would help them improve their performance. So I'm going to go back to Pliny talking about various compounds at her, that stuff. So the idea of using special chemicals with harsh performance is certainly not new. In terms of trying to get drugs to improve performance, even in the early 20th century, people were using compounds. So it was the famous Olympics, 1912, when the first president, the line of the marathon, actually cheated because he drove a car halfway around, or he was doing a car. But the one who actually won had taken strictening and alcohol for these stimulants. But that was perfectly legal. But even that point, people were taking compounds to enhance performance. And it sort of rumbled in the 1930s and better men started to get used, and certainly in Britain, they were being used in some World Cup final and some Football Association Cup finals. And then also compounds like, well, really testosterone, the precursors of antibiotics, people were taking what they called monkey glands or monkey juice, which really was sort of extracts of monkey scrotum, I suppose, to get the testosterone, which is the male's ex hormone, which you get from those glands. And I would argue in the marks, but I was saying about monkey glands. So it was around in the 30s, Freud, Sickman Freud, was the first one to use cocaine to try and improve performance. So he was actually one of the first sports scientists, Sickman Freud, did really nice, interesting studies on the effect of cocaine on handgrip strength. But like the normal sort of normal in the verticals, recreational drugs, it sort of rumbled along in the 20th century, with mild disapproval, concern, is it okay or not? The Second World War saw everyone using amphetamines, and it was defined to keep awakened during the battles, et cetera. And it really was in the 60s that they began to be seen, I think, as being an outright evil. And whether that's a parallel with what's happened with recreational drugs and sports drugs, I don't know. But that's about when steroids came out and being fought off as being being problematic to 60s and 70s. So then it became a big issue, is arguably who started using steroids, which are the animal steroids that increase your power, the compounds that we're talking about, Ben Johnson. But probably it was some Eastern European or Russian weightlifters and/or U.S. bodybuilders, but along those lines, it became more common and widespread. So looking then at the post-war period, when when anabolic steroids come to be used, by bodybuilders, by athletes in the Soviet bloc, who was developing these performance-enhancing drugs? Was this something that pharmaceutical chemists were setting out to do to create drugs that would make people stronger and faster? Well, steroids really evolved. When I evolved, they were discovered, if you like, they're natural molecules. You discover them rather than create them. In the 1930s, there was a big interest by pharmaceutical companies and by researchers in the U.S. and in Switzerland and Germany to Belgium as well, to get to get these molecules. I mean, the first testosterone to try to get the testosterone there was one U.S. scientist who was just using the just cadavers from the Chicago stockyards, a big source of animals, and still is, I think, in that. But certainly in that time, that was a big place where all the animals were killed without culture in the U.S. And some of the wisdom was just taking, you know, hundreds of pieces of urine from Swiss policemen to purify the molecules. So they were doing this mass industrial-scared purification to see what this special molecule was that was the male sex hormone. Once they discovered it, there was a big interest by pharmaceutical companies because they thought this would be wonderful molecules. They would give you long life and strengthen vitality. So there was a huge interest in it for life-enhancing properties. And it's sort of unfortunate that it hasn't really lived up that hype. I mean, it's sort of civilised by human growth hormone at the moment, which, again, hasn't really lived up to it. So it was discovered and developed because it thought it would be good for human health and medicine, not the sport. It turns out it's probably, apart from a few clinical cases, it's most effective in that area, in the sports, in increasing power. So let's turn to the science behind, behind these drugs, behind steroids, and other performance-enhancing drugs. And you start the book by laying out the chemical processes that occur when the body exercises. And we don't have the opportunity to go through all that in the interview. But instead, I'll ask you something that's a more pointed and selfish question related to that. What would be your suggestion as a biochemist for the optimal exercise program for, say, a male academic in his mid-40s? What is going to be the best activity in terms of working his internal chemistry? In terms of health, or in terms of general health? Yeah, general health. I mean, it gets quite boring in the sense. General health, I wouldn't normally exercise any physical activity is good. And when you look at the graphs of cardiovascular risk, which is mostly the better for the exercises in cardiovascular health, reducing heart attacks, any exercise you do, the more you do, is better. So if you look at it, so I almost want exercise. So any activity, and the graph gets steep at the beginning. So if you do no exercise in your 40-year-old academic, do some. If that just means walking from the car to the further or walking up the stairs, do it. You'll see a benefit. You don't need to do, if you're just thinking about the general health benefit, you don't need to do much. You need to do anything. But if you do more, it'll be better. The big debate at the moment in the sports science field is about can you get away with doing very little exercise, but very high intensity. And that's really been the argument in the last 10 years. So there's a group, and it's a number of people that have shown that you can get good fitness by doing essentially three minutes exercise a week. The problem is the three minutes of exercise is absolutely horrible to do. So you do maximum intensity exercise for a minute, and then you do that. It's basically three 20-second exercise. And when we do that exercise, it allows sometimes the students throw up. So it's a level of high intensity. But that's the debate at the moment. Can you get away with very high intensity for short periods of time? Or do you need to do this with a very long period of time? You know, sort of behind the three to 30 minutes, three times a week, which is sort of what they've been recommending. But what I should say, and I really want to say that it's quite clearly, is that if you just want to get reduced your risk of half-tax and stroke, you just need to do more exercise than you're currently doing, almost certainly. And you don't need to be obsessive about it. Just do more. So that's a sort of crude health message. If you've got a specific event to do that you want to train for, then of course, it's a rather more specific exercise program you would need to undertake. Well, let's turn to illegal and unsafe performance boosters. And I want to start first by asking about EPO and blood doping. And in my reading about this in the past about blood doping, I had been under the impression that the purpose of blood doping, so for instance, with long-distance cyclists, was for them to get more oxygen in their blood. But I gather that's not entirely correct, is it? No, it's pretty much correct. I think the reading is correct. It turns out that how fast you can perform in an aerobic sport, like long-distance cycling, like long-distance running, is very controlled by the physical amount of oxygen you can dissolve in your blood. And that's controlled by a lot of how much of the hemoglobin, the red protein that carries the oxygen around the blood you can have. So anything that increases that would increase the oxygen content in your blood and therefore should improve performance. So no, I think that's pretty right. They're pretty correct. That's why athletes do ask to training or they train in these low oxygen tents to try and increase the number of red blood cells, the number of hemoglobin molecules, the amount of oxygen they can carry. Okay. So then my confusion as a historian with a less than layman's understanding of chemistry was that altitude training and connected with that blood doping was aimed perhaps at not at putting more oxygen into the blood, but getting the blood or getting the athlete to perform on less oxygen in the blood. No, because in fact, one of the problems with altitude training has historically been that you can't train as hard at altitude. So it's not, and therefore, it's not that you get used to training it with low amount of oxygen, therefore you're better when you sprint. No, it's a genuine the body's response to low oxygen is to increase the number of red blood cells. And then when you get to a lower level, you've got more red blood cells so you can perform better. So it's not that you stress the body and do the exercise altitude. In fact, what athletes do now is they go to altitude to sleep there and live there and come down to ground level to do their training. It's called live high train low. So they deliberately avoid what you're saying. They don't want to do the training altitude because they can't train at the right intensity and they detrain themselves. So they they train on the ground, see level and go up to altitude to live. And so then does doping mimic that? So doping does mimic that in a in a in a nutshell. So the body's response to altitude or to a situation where it has low oxygen. Number of things get triggered, but in the long term the trigger is making more red blood cells. And the molecule that blurs that is a number of them but on that pathway is a molecule called EPO or risk reparative. The body in response to low oxygen to get it high up to you is the kidney releases the hormone EPO and EPO then triggers an increase in red blood cells. You can get around that therefore not bother with the altitude by just injecting EPO. So EPO is a shortcut to do that because it's a shortcut. It actually turns out you could probably get to a higher number of red blood cells because you can get more EPO by injection and you can by going to altitude. So it's not a shortcut but it actually probably gets you to a higher level. And the other thing you can do is just do a state blood transfusion which immediately gives you more red blood cells and that's the quickest way to be able to run faster. And does this work then? Yeah I mean the surprising thing is that in sports doping it's all basically parasitised around medicine. So even the steroids we talked about were originally supposed to be medical drugs taken up by sports doping. And there's a sort of might be surprising when anything works because medicine usually takes things that don't work and tries to make them normal. And what sports people want to do is take normal and make them super normal. There's no guarantee that something that takes some of these deficient to a normal level will also get them to a super normal level but it turns out that seems to be the case with red blood cells. So if you have somebody who obviously loses blood you give them blood transfusion to bring them back to the normal level. If you take a normal person and you give them more blood that appears to give you even more oxygen and you perform even better. And what people thought with the case was maybe the blood would get too thick and therefore it wouldn't flow as well because of too many red blood cells and that would counteract that effect. Actually that doesn't seem to be the case. Pretty much you can go, you can increase the red blood cells to levels above where you can get naturally and you increase performance. So that's been a big issue and a big problem in the sport. In the sport, don't begin to see it but you know it pretty much does work. I mean if I had to be hard on heart to say what were the two of all the many things that actually used to improve performance band or non-band, the two things that really work would be anabolic steroids for female athletes giving them male sex hormones getting the muscular works and blood doping with any endurance athletes. There are things that I would say the best scientific evidence that they work. Everything else is a little bit anecdotal and circumstantial. So as you said blood doping is as effective for endurance athletes and you've already mentioned anabolic steroids. So I want to turn to that and before we do talk about steroids something interesting I found in the book is that you write that while sports scientists know a lot about blood and oxygen and how they work in athletics, they don't know as much about the internal chemistry of muscles during exercise. Why is that the case? It's a good question because I was really surprised because sometimes you leave fields of science that you don't know about and you come back to them. Why isn't this all that problem? I assume that it would be really well known exactly how testosterone worked to increase muscle mass. I think when I was an undergraduate student I'd learned about how sex hormones work. So you're the basic thing about how steroid hormones or sex hormones work and they bind to a receptor that go inside the cell. But actually the individual parts of DNA which is where ultimately where these molecules interact with which cause you to trigger the pathway to increase muscle protein to therefore to increase muscle mass. That pathway is not well characterized in the muscle. So we know quite a bit about how testosterone causes secondary sexual effects that we have. We require a lot of it in prostate cancer because in testosterone levels causes problems in prostate cancer. But in the muscle I would say we don't know the fine molecular details of how testosterone works. Now there's not an awful lot of research going on in that area because the research is usually driven by medical need and it's unfortunate that steroids have not proved to be this wonderful medical panacea that was hoped in the 1930s and 1940s. So there's not a huge amount of research because it looks like the area is not going to be productive for new molecules but also the number of diseases that cause problems with muscle mass is each few. I mean they're not minor, I mean these are muscle dystrophy but it's not like cancer, it's not like heart disease, it's not like Alzheimer's, it's smaller and therefore there's less research money goes in. So less research money means less discovery. So I think that would be my view. I mean there's not a lot of money in sports. You might think there is but actually in sort of thought in terms of the science but there's not a lot of money and compared to medicine even sport compared to medicine is as small as it's more industry. So that's probably why the development has not been as rapid as we might have thought. It's always just complicated and we're not clever enough to find it out. I mean it might just be we haven't done the right experiments yet but I think that's potentially what's happening. Which means there are unexplored fields for dopers to sort of tie on to but I think what I've said past of all is that they tend not to do that because that's expensive and difficult, they tend to parasitize on drugs that scientists have found for something else. So although in the book I talk about certain pathways that you might want to think about doing if you wanted to improve performance, I don't think that any chance that, you know, dopers would do that. There was weight for medicine to do something similar and then copy it. That would be the concern. Well following up on that, sir, you mentioned that the dopers who are developing these drugs, who are these people? Who is making EPO and anabolic steroids? Are these chemicals easy to make? Are they difficult to make? Well it's easy to make. I mean it depends what level we're talking about. So EPO is just made, I mean it's a normal compound and it has a very strong important clinical use in treating lack of red blood cells in the urine kidney disease. So if you have a kidney problem you have less red blood cells because you're not making EPO, they're treated with EPO. So there's a big black marking in EPO and it's relatively easy to make it now by modern techniques. It used to be that these drugs were hard to make because you need to purify them from dead bodies. But EPO you're making in biogenetic techniques now in bacteria in cultured cells and that's fairly easy and it's off-patent so there's generic companies making it. So EPO has a potential, you know, on the black mark you even get it. Same with human growth hormone, another hormone like that that you can access. An avoid steroids, I'm not an expert, I'm not a biochemist, I'm not a journalist, I don't know where all the roots of black market drugs are. An avoid steroids can be made relatively simply in laboratories. So it's probably with steroids a mixture of the black market because they do have some clinical use and home labs, I think places in the US and Mexico, probably other places in the world. Some countries you can buy steroids over the counter because you can buy medicines over the counter so they can ship that way. So I think it's a combination of things. I'm not an expert because I, you know, I'm not into the drug trade but it's not that difficult. What's more difficult is to make a new compound. So there are also access to compounds in clinical trials that's not in the market. So there's quite often a new variety of EPO that are being made because EPO, you modify the drug to make it better last longer or we have less side effects. And when those are in clinical trials, they might be hard to get hold up before they get into the commercial market. So but a lot of the interest is not in just getting the molecules but to get ones that can't be tested for. The classic example of that was the Balco laboratories and the US chemists who develop a molecule called the Clear, which is what Marion Jones took in Montgomery and in the UK, Duane Chambers, which was specifically designed such that an engineer in the lab could not be detected by anti-doping agencies. In fact, I think I could see that carrying on being happening because that's an idea that it's not too difficult to think of how you might do that. You're not trying to think of a whole new field of researchers saying how to make this molecule less easy to detect and that is a possibility. But to do that, the DOPERS would need a good amount of resources to do that kind of development. And as you were just saying, there isn't that much money. Well, Patrick Johnson developed that was not, it was pretty much in the same sort of labs that make recreational drugs in the US. It's not that difficult. But of course, you do not have any expense of farm steelcomers in doing clinical trials. If you develop a new drug for a medicine, you have to spend tens of millions of pounds going through regulation. They just put it straight into people. I'm sorry, I think it's actually pretty scandalous really. So it's possible that modifications could have been really bad, but they just did them anyway. So in that sense, it's cheaper because you're not doing any of the regulation and any of the safe testing animals. It is putting it straight to people. So it's a little bit cheaper. The chemistry is not that difficult. I think for the versions of EPO might be a bit more complicated. But I think much more likely it's the fine molecules that drug companies use and then copy them. And I think that that is still possible. There are compounds on the EPO pathway, but not EPO, that I think might be of interest to DOPERS. And so there's a great interest in the anti-doping agencies talking to the pharmaceutical companies that say, "Okay, you've got a new molecule. It's going to get out to the DOPERS." But either make it themselves or they'll make it, feel it, give it to us and we want to test for it. And they develop the tests during the pre-clinical testing, during the animal testing, to make sure that when they get into the athletes, they've got a test ready for it. And that's, I think, a much more, if you'd like, aggressive anti-doping activity to really make sure they know what's available and can test for it. I want to go back to anabolic steroids and back to the story that starts your book. You had mentioned that anabolic steroids with women provide a clear jump in performance. But thinking of Ben Johnson and his world record, was that the result of steroids, would you say? I think it's difficult to judge on individuals. I think Johnson probably ran fast because he was on steroids, yes. I think he'd be very careful because I refuse to go down the line of saying it's when you see a fast time that person must have been on steroids. But I mean, my biggest time at the Olympics, when I was on go on radio and TV, was when a Chinese swimmer did a very fast time and a US coach said, "That must be doping." And I'm, you know, million most of the athletes were saying, "You can't do that." Otherwise, everyone gets accused of doping. So I'm very careful of not saying a fast time means you must be doping. Clearly, Ben Johnson thought it was improving his speed and, you know, their power. And there's reasonable evidence that steroids can have that effect. So it wouldn't surprise the Ben Johnson, for him, the steroids made him go faster, yes. So in that sense, I think it's certainly a possibility. There's also a big placebo effect. If you're on steroids, you know you're on steroids, you go a lot faster. I mean, it's not clear that Tim Montgomery or Duane Chambers were faster because they're on steroids. Me and Duane Chambers is the UK athlete. It wasn't a huge lot faster when he was on steroids. And that was only for a couple of years compared to what he wasn't on them. We'd less care about Marion Jones because exactly when he was on steroids, I'm not clear about. So I think you have to be careful to be precise and certainly to accuse people who got fast times because they're on steroids. But I think with Ben Johnson, it's likely that he got faster because of the power. And that was kind of athlete he was. I think it was almost certainly the case. So Chris, you also have a chapter on gene doping. And an interesting statement you make in the book at the start of the book is that really all high performance athletes are genetic anomalies, and which makes reading it made perfect sense. I could run 100 meter sprints all day for a year, and I'm never going to run under 10 seconds. But is it possible in some way to create those genetic anomalies? I think I would have said to create it now initially when I first started the book. There are a few examples of creations in some situations where it might be possible. So I think with someone like you saying bold, it's some horrible combination of things. And we just don't know enough about it. We don't think how you would create it. We don't know enough. We can look at the biomechanics at Bolton, say he takes fewer paces to get where he's going. Very unusual because he's tall, got power, and could coordinate. And it's very difficult to find anyone who looks like he's saying bold. So I was looking at the book thinking, "Well, what are the sport? Would there be somebody who was that tall? Six, five, six, six? That powerful." And I thought there must be an American footballer who would like that. Because if you're a wide receiver, you've got to be strong and powerful. Pigeon had passed. It's not true. There are very few American footballers who are anywhere near as tall as Bolton. And they're saying not as fast. So he's a bit of an anomaly, but it's probably a combination of things we don't know about. So in that sense, we don't know about the Jake Bolton of Bolton, but almost certainly it's in his genes as well as his all his training. But when it comes to certain effects, we do know more. And we probably can potentially alter it genetically. And the example I would give most famous relates to this blood doping we talked about, the idea of having more oxygen in your blood and particularly with multiple EPO. There was a Finnish cross-country critic called Iromantivanta, who won many gold medals, one of the most famous winter Olympians there. There was in Finland. And he had the high red blood cell count. So you might think he was a lot of red blood cell. He'd been doping. It turned out he had a modified receptor for EPO. So even though he had the same amount of EPO in his body, naturally to everyone else, he was completely overactive in his body to sponsor that EPO. He made all that blood cell. And he had that for his whole life. He lived with it, appeared to be okay. So he was a single gene modification that made him a better export. So that's, if you like, the idea that the gene dopers, people are like, you know, hokey onto that. Maybe there's a magic single gene. Because you can't possibly change 20 or 30 genes in somebody. You want to create something. So what the gene dopers want to do is find a single one that makes a difference. And I think with endurance sport, it's possible. I mean, with power sports, there is one gene that has an interest. And that's the myostatin gene, which if you look at, I mean, the best example is I've ever seen these. They're called Belgian double muscled cows. You look at a bull from that breed, and they're just huge. The double muscled, they look massively strong and muscled. That's a single defect that removes a gene called myostatin. And myostatin, that's myosmuscled Greek statin, means stop. It stops muscle growth. You remove that gene and you get this very enhanced muscle growth. So again, the idea is maybe you could design somebody without that. Now, we do know there are people walking around who don't have that gene. But we don't know how many of them are powerful athletes and weightlisters. So because we don't gene test people. At the end of the book, you turn to questions of why doping is illegal. And you ask whether it should be illegal. And in that chapter, you take on two of the main arguments for banning doping. One, that doping is unsafe for the health of athletes. And two, that doping provides an unfair advantage. So can you talk about the conclusions you made in that chapter to those two questions? Yeah, I mean, I always try and present the questions and say, look, let's look at the science, make our discussion on the base of understanding science. I mean, understand how this molecule got a risk. And understand, does it improve performance, base it on the science and be sensible. So, I bet it's just everybody in the street can make that decision. So, actually, one of the reasons why the book was to say, okay, we're going to be talking about drugs in sport. Let's understand the science. So I have my own personal views, which I will give you because I'm sure you're interested. But read the book and come to your own views. That's really what I'm saying. What my own personal views are, you're asking in terms of safety and in terms of debate forms and all that. I mean, I think I do have concerns about the safety. And it's largely because of the same thing any parent would have that. Once this is become acceptable, they'll get used by kids and then there'll be pressure but on kids to use them. And I think that's similar to what happened in East Germany, where there was pressure to put on kids and adults to take drugs. I think it's, and they're potentially unsafe. I think that's problematic. And I'd rather there was at least the pretense that we're trying to stop it. So I think my personal view would be that if you think it's, people who want to legalize drugs, make them unban, are not really aware of what Pandora's box they're opening. And because biochemists can think of lots of weird things, and I'll talk about some of them. And I think just saying, let's have a level playing field, I think there are serious things that would be problematic. I think out of all it's always in females. It's very difficult to see how you would think that, you know, like the natural that people do. But that's a sort of sensible route to go down. I mean, I was just into this afternoon by a female bodybuilder who doesn't go in the top competition because there's no way she can compete in those, competes naturally on the basis that, you know, she doesn't want to have the side effects from there. And I think that seems to me sensible. And I don't think you'd want to have those sorts of competitions. So my personal view is that there are some areas where the health problems are so obvious that really we should hold the line there. I'm much less concerned about some areas where the health risks are very minor, and the performance benefits are less strong. Things like the sort of cough mix and cold remedies that have stimulants in them, and people sometimes test positive for their cold things like pseudo-ethical which is banned for, and really not that bad for you, and probably not that performance enhancing. But actually, I think the sporting bodies and the amphibians are sort of happening on board with that now, as well as recreational drugs, which are banned in sport because their bad for the images sport rather than their performance enhancing. And they've now, those banned are now quite short, and they've come along with those lines. So I think it's sort of about right, in my view, where we stand. But in some ways, not the similar debate to drugs and society, you can imagine in a different place. And that's perfectly feasible if society wants that. So what I always want to say is that, okay, if you get to that place, think about it carefully, because you may not really want to be there. So sometimes people who think that haven't thought it through, haven't thought about the science through and the implications. And I think that's what my book is about, really, trying to enable people to make informed decisions about drugs in sport. Well, we're almost out of time, Chris, and we do need to talk about Lance Armstrong. We can talk about him now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he couldn't do that before. He's not even in the book. He is. He's in the book twice. And you mentioned him only in passing. And I like the line that you had on your blog, though, after the news broke of Lance Armstrong back in August where you wrote. Now I'm finally free to write about Lance Armstrong with little chance of initiating a lawsuit. So I'll ask you, I'll phrase it this way. When the second edition of your book comes out, how will you put or is it necessary to put Lance Armstrong into the book? Oh, clearly I'll be in the book, because in terms of the whole Tour de France issue is one of the paradigm issues of doping in sport as had been the East Germans. So if you want to look at the situations where doping is systematic and therefore I can, you know, really problematic because, you know, then it's real unfairness rather than the odd person you want to catch. So organized doping, organized crime versus the old criminal, then the East German system clearly was one. I think arguably the concern with Balco and what they were trying to do was they're not quite the same scale was the concern in the US and then the Tour de France where it was clear that a number of teams, if not the majority, were systematically doping. Now that's okay if that's all above board and you say that's all right, let's do it, let's control it. I have no problem there. That's what the rules are, but the rules are that way and you then end up being kicking people off your team which was what was happening because they were not doping or talking about it. Then I think that's problematic. So I think it makes it easier to talk about that when you can talk about the person who won seven Tour de France in a row and has been implicated in it. So in that sense, yes, he'd be in the story. I think what's intriguing to me, which I do mention in my blog, is that, you know, it's clear that if Lance Armstrong was not doping, as he should say, he still says he was not doping, if Lance Armstrong was not doping, all the people he beat were accused of doping and some of them found guilty of doping. So he was the only one, you know, not doing it at the time if that story is true, if we believe him. So either he was just superhuman and didn't need to dope, or he was doping better than all the others as well, which is why I sort of mentioned in my blog a bit and I think that's an interesting question when you look at some of the fine details of the history of this. He might well have been doping better than other people were doping and I think that's a separate discussion. We haven't finished the story about Lance Armstrong and cycling that period. It has not ended and in some ways I can't talk about because there's obviously a long-growing discussion between USABA, the US Anti-Dope Agency, and UCI, which is the Union Cyclist International, and about the doping test that were done in that period. So there's a still an ongoing debate that cycling hasn't quite cleared out its stables yet. But certainly, at the Lance Arms, I was trying to help. And interestingly, I was, I think whatever wrote that blog, I thought, I thought when Lance Armstrong decided not to defend the case anymore, that people would stick with the settled views of public, would come to the sort of settled views that I guess he hoped for, that some people are against him, some people are for him. Let's just leave it like that. It all sweeps under the table. But I think what's happened at least in Europe is that the public, informed by the journalists, who had all the best stories ready to go to print, have pretty much come to the settled view that he was guilty. And I think Tyler Hamilton's book coming out now, I think, will increase that view. So when I thought it would be a settled sort of, might sweep under the table, I think what is said at least in our side of the pond has been very clear. It's still, some of the cyclists don't want to talk about it, but in terms of the public now, the concept of Lance Armstrong as being a prenacity, unfairly accused, has sort of gone in as much as they're concerned about it at all. So I think that's an interesting development. I always say when I'm talking about him, he has always said he didn't, so I think you all should at least say that even if someone has been found guilty. So the legal reasons I do always, always tend to say that. But I think that's true. So I think his reputation on our side of the pond has pretty much gone, except at the same, at the time, everyone else was pretty much doping then, and he was still the best. You know, he beat them day in, day out. So, you know, tour in, tour out. So, you know, his story is still pretty amazing, but I think it's still not definitive until Lance tells a story, which I don't think he's going to. So I think, you know, that's it. So I don't think we'll ever know. And which in some ways does it matter? Well, I think it'd be good to fight between itself and and finally put that behind it. And I think it's close to that. I think coping the next year that will get, will get solved. So the last two Tour de France's have been most of what's there, and I think I would completely agree a lot cleaner than in previous, previous years. So that's, that's good because it's more honest, even if what you think about doping, at least it's clear what's going on. And there are no rules being, being broken or fewer, which I think is good. You do raise a question at the end of the book, and, and this is interesting, and I don't know how to phrase it in terms of a question, but in looking at doping, and in particular, genetic doping and the possibilities for that, we're, we're really looking at the limits of what humans are, are, are able to do in terms of athletic performance. Correct. And, and you do cite some research in which we, we see we're in athletics, in track, we're reaching the limit of what is, of what is humanly possible. And so, is it, is it possible then do we see doping as a means of, of extending that or of pushing that boundary? Yeah, I think, I think back to the first chapter, I talked about, you know, about what are we evolved to be? Where are we optimized already? Um, what, what event and, and I, and I, I suspect we've evolved to be good at very long distances. Um, not too fast, which is, there's very few sports and like that. So, um, there probably is, if you like a gap for us to get better by genes and by, by training. Um, whether doping gets you beyond that, I, I'm not sure. I think if you were able to genetically engineer a person precisely, there must be a gap you can get, you can get to, but we're so far away from being able to do that. And I think we'll see those changes, you know, if we see that, we'll see changes in other walks of life before, before then in terms of creating superhumans, because you've got to do it in the germline, I think. So, to really do these big effects, which we do in animals, because in animals, we can see very large effects. Um, I'm manipulating genes, but you do it, you know, in the embryo. And we ain't going to be doing that at that level in, in humans, um, serving up with numbers of genes, um, many times soon. I think, I think, um, we do it in very specialized cases, but it's not going to be common. Um, so I think in that sense, I think it's theoretically possible, but I, I think it must be possible to go faster, but the various calculations at what is the fastest time you could possibly do. I was interested in 100, the men, 100 meters is one where people do say there's, there's space to move, um, on the extrapolations or the few events. So, which is really why bulk coming out there is, you know, is, is not as surprising as you might think. Um, to their talking, possibly about 9.4, 9.3, which is a bit of a way to go still, um, in, in those events. I think in terms of women's events, I think about that, there's clearly almost two levels of, of activity for women's events. So, that is true. So, I, I would say men's events is always a bit more complicated. Probably the maximum amount of blood therapy you can do for the aerobic events. Women's events with steroids, I think you are almost doing two different sports. So, uh, I think that's true, and I think therefore that's a different thing, because you are turning a woman into parting a man because you're giving them the men's power. And we have said we know that those genes make a difference. So, one genetic difference we know is, is strong, is male or female. So, we know that Y-chromosome has a massive effect on sports performance. So, it's clearly that's there. So, those are the other differentiations in men and women. You can, it's a big, what we call a scientific, dynamic range in the female performance, which you can access. Um, I think the interesting thing is the comparison with horse racing, which I used in the book, where we've got a limited stock. We've got to, it would not go in many horses, and it's not clear how much faster we can get horses to go. Well, I think that's an interesting question, where you do the calculations, that it's not been massively faster in the last 30, 40 years horses. So, um, it ought to be getting better because of better training stuff, but it's not massively where it's compared to athletes. It is true, but we're looking at much bigger genetic stock with athletes, you know, the whole 4 billion population, and, and, you know, from going in the dim past, whereas the horses, we know much, much shorter, smaller and more areas. So, I think we haven't quite got there with athletes yet. So, Chris, you're doing, you're doing your research in artificial blood, and you have this book out, or you're going to be sticking in the, in the field of blood research, or do you have plans for the, the second edition of this book? What are you, what are you working on now? Um, well, I'm supposed to be writing a book on blood, actually. So, blood are very short introductions, they're a general thing of blood, rather than the support of doping, that's a book I'm writing on. Um, the research I do is partly on artificial blood, and, you know, there's, there's a patent out there, you've got a few million pounds, put it my way, we can take it to the next level. Um, but in terms of the other is, that I also work, um, in a sort of, partly information sport, but also in medicine, this, to basically my users trying to shine light to look at how the body works. And in particular, look at hemoglobin, which is this red molecule I talked about, the carisoxone around the body, we can shine light on the body and look at the hemoglobin inside the muscle for athletes, or inside the brain, the injured patients. And that's really another major research area. I've got to try to develop new tools for looking at the body, um, non-invasively. So, not taking a blood sample, just looking directly and seeing how the option is being used. You know, the, the dream is that sort of the start, I can, you know, I'm, I use a 40-year-old academic, looking at what Dr. McCoy did, bones, when he put away the little recorder of our body and saw, saw everything that was going wrong. So, we can do that a little bit with light, with, um, lasers, but it, it's not what we want to be at. So, the dream of doing that and looking at the oxygen without touching the body and, and developing tools for that is, is another interest I've got. And that's both in sport, um, and in medicine. So, all based on blood, but not necessarily taking the red stuff out and looking at it, trying to look at it inside the body, that's really right to smile. You've been listening to an interview with Chris Cooper about his book, Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat, the science behind drugs and sport, published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. New Books and Sports is part of the New Books Network, which offers dozens of channels of podcast interviews with the authors of new publications on subjects from science fiction to philosophy. If you like what you heard here, please follow New Books and Sports on Twitter or Friend Us on Facebook. You can give us your feedback, offer suggestions, and find links to thoughtful sports writing from around the world. I'm your host, Bruce Burgland. Thank you for listening and enjoy your week.
This past August, the saga of Lance Armstrong came to its inglorious end. The seven-time champion of the Tour de France and Olympic medalist ended his defense against charges that he had engaged in blood doping during his cycling career. In the judgment of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the end of Armstrong’s challenge was effectively a concession of guilt. The body responded by stripping Armstrong of his titles and banning him from cycling competitions. Armstrong, however, has continued to maintain his innocence. It appears that many Americans agree with him. In various polls conducted after the USADA’s actions, large majorities of respondents stated their belief that Armstrong had not engaged in doping. But outside the US, opinion of the cyclist is somewhat different. As Peter Beaumont remarked in The Observer, the real question is not whether Armstrong engaged in doping, it’s why his fall from grace didn’t come sooner.
Lance Armstrong now joins a notorious collection of athletes who have been stained by allegations or proof of doping: baseball’s Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, sprinter Marion Jones, swimmer Michelle Smith, cross-country skiers Olga Danilova and Larissa Lazutina, Chinese swimmers of the late 1990s. Chris Cooper begins his study of the science of doping with what was perhaps the most shocking episode of a champion athlete caught doping: Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who set the world record in the 100-meter dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics only to be stripped of his record and gold medal days later. As Cooper points out, athletes had long been using anabolic steroids. And indeed, Johnson was not the only sprinter in that race to have been found using drugs. But the fall of the gold medalist in the Olympics’ marquee event brought the use of performance-enhancing drugs to broad public attention. Since 1988, great athletic accomplishments have been viewed with suspicion, while athletes have been obligated to pee in cups.
Athletes still take performance-enhancing drugs. Why? What benefits, if any, do they gain? Chris’ book, Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: The Science Behind Drugs in Sport (Oxford University Press, 2012), addresses these questions. As a researcher in biochemistry, Chris explains what the drugs do, and whether they work. We learn from the interview that doping does provide a clear advantage, in some instances. But in other cases, the drug’s effects are slim–which raises the question: should they be banned?
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