The Steroid Detective

By Jeffrey Kluger Sunday, Feb. 22, 2004
    • There was no way to be sure what was in the mysterious vial that arrived in Dr. Don Catlin's Los Angeles lab last June. All he knew was that he had been told to find out what it was — and if it was what he suspected, it could mean big trouble for a lot of people.

    That trouble arrived earlier this month when the Department of Justice announced that it was charging four San Francisco — area men with 42 counts of conspiring to distribute anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs — the charges stemming, in part, from what Catlin found in the vial. Things heated up further last week when the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco released affidavits from people involved in the case declaring that Greg Anderson, personal trainer for home-run king Barry Bonds, had given steroids to Major League Baseball players — though all the defendants have pleaded not guilty to all charges. So far, no athletes have been indicted, but more sneakers are expected to drop.


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    The 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 League Baseball, "the people trying to catch users of performance-enhancing drugs are going to be one step behind." In the current case, however, they caught up splendidly.

    The chemical at the center of the recent indictments is tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), a substance that is manufactured, the government charges, by the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO), a maker of nutritional supplements, based in Burlingame, Calif., whose president, Victor Conte, was among the indicted men. BALCO, which boasts a client list that includes the San Francisco Giants' Bonds and the New York Yankees' Jason Giambi, claims it traffics only in legal supplements. The Department of Justice questions that, and in 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 it was."

    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.

    What makes the new drug so cunning is that it grows unstable in the body, breaking apart before it reaches the urine and becoming invisible to screening tests. To track it, the UCLA lab invented a new test that is sensitive to the elements of the deconstructed steroid. So far, five track and field stars and four players from football's Oakland Raiders have tested positive for the drug.

    Catlin, though pleased he helped move the case forward, is under no illusions that the jig is up for the dopers. If one lab can invent a nearly undetectable steroid, others are certainly doing the same. "People are developing designer drugs of all sorts," he says. "That's the bitter part. The sweetness is that [this time] it was discovered." For the four men soon to go on trial, things are about to get anything but sweet.