A Level Playing Field

At This High-Security Lab On IUSM's Indianapolis Campus, Scientists Make The Calls To Ensure Athletes . .

Last summer St. Louis Cardinals' slugger Mark McGwire made headlines across the country, and an IU lab was flooded with calls. Why? Because the headlines were not about McGwire breaking Roger Maris' single season home run record but about his taking the steroid androstenedione.

The calls went to Larry D. Bowers, PhD, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and of chemistry, and scientific director of the IU Drug Analysis Laboratory for Athletic Drug Testing and Toxicology. The lab is one of only two in the nation accredited by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC).

Dr. Bowers is an internationally recognized expert on doping. His office and the IU Drug Analysis labs are secluded inside the John D. VanNuys Medical Science Building, secured with time-coded locks and a sign-in procedure, all according to the rules of the IOC and the USOC.

Security is a major issue to protect the integrity of the work that goes on inside, Dr. Bowers explains. The 18,000 urine specimens received at the lab annually are identified only by a number code; no names are attached. And the lab's staff of fifteen does not even know the identity of the competition from which the specimens were collected.

Specimens sent to the lab for testing may be from amateur sporting events sponsored by the IOC or the USOC. The lab also tests urine specimens from athletes participating in events sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the National Football League and some international sports federations.

When testing specimens from sporting events, the IU Drug Analysis Laboratory looks for evidence of use of possibly hundreds of banned or illegal substances or compounds. The lab also does testing for the Indian-apolis coroner's office and pre-employment screenings for IUSM. That testing is usually less complex, with fewer illegal substances potentially in the mix.

Like many of the top-flight athletes it tests, the lab operates with high-performance efficiency. Nine mass spectrometers, the workhorses of the operation, run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week performing innumerable tests for substances and compounds banned in the various sporting worlds.

Through the generosity of the USOC and at the insistence of the IOC, the lab has acquired a $500,000 high resolution mass spectrometer for steroid testing. The new equipment is fifty times more sensitive than the typical mass spectrometer found in the lab.

Lab techs interpret the data supplied by the computers tied to the spectrometers. On a parallel track, researchers are working to determine methods to identify new compounds athletes may be taking.

All of this is done not so much to police the sport, but to ensure a level playing field, explains Dr. Bowers, who is passionate about protecting the rights of athletes. He also is adamant about helping younger athletes resist the temptation to "enhance" their natural athletic abilities, and thus avoid the severe effects these substances can have on a developing body.

"Through testing, you are able to provide athletes with some guarantee that they won't be the only competitors who are drug free," he says. "There are three ways in which this should be done: educating people on the dangers of drug use, testing to identify those who are taking drugs, and providing a fair adjudication process to assure that the athlete has the right to appeal a test result."