As it tries to rid itself of steroids, Major League Baseball is almost certain to strike out. The reason: Athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs have science on their side, experts said Friday.
Chemists are continually refining their recipes to stay at least one step ahead of any testing regimen.
"I could figure out how to take a fair amount of testosterone and you'd never catch me, and if I can say that, a lot of others can too," said Don H. Catlin, founder of the Anti-Doping Research Institute in West Los Angeles and former director of UCLA's Olympic drug-testing lab.
"The people who are doing the testing are getting better and the dopers are getting more and more clever," said Catlin, who has a $500,000 grant from Major League Baseball to develop a test for human growth hormone. "Every time we think we got it under control and have it whacked, there is already something else out there they are using."
The race between baseball and dopers is made more lopsided by the fact that the amount of drugs that athletes use can be minuscule -- far less than the amount testers require to detect it.
"Small doses work," said Charles Yesalis, a retired professor of health and human development at Penn State University. "A 1% to 2% increase in performance is unbelievably valuable to an elite athlete, and very often we can't even measure that as statistically significant in the laboratory."
Athletes have been doping at least since American Thomas Hicks won the 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis with the help of brandy and strychnine, a stimulant, administered by associates during the race.
Anabolic steroids help the body produce muscle and other tissues. Chemists isolated them in the early 1930s and made synthetic versions soon afterward. It didn't take long for scientists to adapt them for use in weightlifting and other athletic competitions to boost strength.
Major League Baseball banned steroids in 1991, though testing didn't begin until 2003. Players adapted by switching to other banned substances, said Dr. Gary Wadler, the incoming chairman of the prohibited list and methods committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
"As we've gotten better at our detection of anabolic steroids, there was a shift to human growth hormone because there was not testing being done for it," said Wadler, who is also a clinical associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine.
