Word: catlin
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...determined prosecution is a bad turn for bulked-up stars packing dozens of pounds of suspicious new muscle on frames that never before carried such weight. But the news was even worse for them because it's not just G-men on the case--it's Catlin too, and when it comes to drug cheaters, he knows his business...
Professor of pharmacology at UCLA and head of the university-based Olympic Analytical Laboratory, Catlin understands better than almost anybody that the sports-doping war is essentially a pharmacological arms race, with chemists in illegal labs tinkering with steroid formulations so that the drugs can perform their muscle-building jobs while sidestepping tests designed to detect them. The testers, for their part, strive to discover the existence of the new drugs and develop ways to screen for them, driving the bad guys to modify them further, and so on. "By definition," says Rob Manfred, a labor-relations executive with Major...
...June an unnamed track coach gave the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) a syringe said to hold traces of a new chemical that had hit the steroid circuit--and also said to have been supplied by Conte. The USADA turned the contents of the syringe over to Catlin. "All we were told was that it [contained] a drug that was being used by athletes," he says...
Whatever the syringe held, Catlin got straight to work on it. The most important tools a pharmaceutical gumshoe has are the mass spectrometer and the gas chromatographer. With the help of this hardware, an unknown substance can be burned at high temperature and the gas that results can be channeled into a sensor, through which the molecules stream in order of size. A readout then lists their weight and concentration. Using this information, the scientists create a blueprint of the chemical as a whole. "At the end of two months," says Catlin, "we were able to draw what we thought...
Drawing the chemical is only the first step. Next Catlin had to build it, which he did, precisely following the schematic he and his team had drawn. Next, they ran it back through the chromatographer. It perfectly matched what they had been sent in the vial...