Alumni Gazette
DOCTOR & DETECTIVE: Internationally recognized for his expertise as a scientist, Don Catlin ’65M (MD) has developed several of the tests used to detect performance-enhancing substances among athletes. (Photo: AP Images)An avid cyclist, Don Catlin ’65M (MD) has been paying close attention to the sport over the past several years. But as the cycling season turns to its signature events such as the Tour de France this summer, the noted medical scientist is watching more than which rider is at the front of the peloton.
Catlin, one of the world’s foremost authorities on sports doping, is overseeing a comprehensive testing program for two of the most prominent American teams in international cycling—Team Columbia and Team Garmin-Slipstream (formerly Team Garmin-Chipotle).
As part of the teams’ bid to demonstrate that cycling has put the doping scandals of the past several years behind, Catlin, the founder and former longtime director of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, and his new company are testing team members over the course of several months to compare samples to the athletes’ baseline chemistry. Any major changes in the chemistry, such as a spike in blood hemoglobin, could tip off testers that drugs have been used.
It’s the kind of longitudinal monitoring that internists do with their patients, watching lab tests over time to analyze what metabolic changes reveal about a patient’s health. Such testing is now being used by the International Cycling Union in what it calls a “biological passport program,” designed to show that athletes are clean.
“This gives you a baseline, and then any big changes can reflect usage,” Catlin says.
The testing is the latest high-profile assignment for Catlin, who as an internist and an assistant professor at UCLA was asked to create the U.S. Olympics testing operation, which he guided into the world’s largest antidoping laboratory. His UCLA lab routinely tested competitors for the U.S. Olympic Committee, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Major League Baseball ’s Minor Leagues, and the National Football League. By 2007, the lab was testing 50,000 samples annually and had 50 employees.
Since leaving UCLA in 2007, Catlin’s analyses have continued to be seen as the gold standard in the science of combating sports doping. He’s launched two new endeavors aimed at continuing his work, Anti-Doping Research Inc. and the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute, based in Los Angeles. When seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong announced his comeback to cycling last year, he noted that he was turning to Catlin to carry out a testing regimen that would include making results available online. As Armstrong joined the Tour of California in February, he and Catlin realized that expenses and logistical problems made their plans impractical.
“I wanted to do the program and so did Lance,” says Catlin. “But as we got further and further into it, we realized it was going to be pretty hard. His team was paying for it. So they had to deal with nickels and dimes, which are short these days. Testing somebody every three days, you need collectors around the globe, and that mounts up.”
Catlin admits he didn’t know much about anabolic steroids in the early 1980s when an International Olympic Committee official asked if he’d help set up a drug-testing lab for the 1984 Summer Olympics.
“Here I was, a struggling assistant professor, trying to work my way up to associate, and then full, professor,” says Catlin in his office on Los Angeles’s West Side. “This was a side trip I could make. I went for it, and I never looked back.”
In addition to conducting testing programs for the international bike-racing tour, his new company is developing a reliable urine test to detect human growth hormone and is working on a national drug-testing program for the equine industry.
With millions of dollars at stake, the pressures on competitors to seek an edge with drugs remain high, Catlin says.
“A cardinal feature of doping is that some athletes will experiment with any new substance that might improve their performance,” he says. “They do not wait for regulatory approvals. If they can obtain a supply, they will try it. This means scientists need to anticipate and develop tests even before the drug has been misused by athletes.”
Catlin, who grew up in Orange, Conn., a New Haven suburb, enrolled in the School of Medicine and Dentistry after earning his undergraduate degree at Yale. He recalls Rochester’s collegial atmosphere as well as its dedication to medical research.
“At Rochester, I learned that the practice of medicine involved a lifetime of research,” says Catlin, who spoke at his 30th reunion in 1995. “As a physician, you are both a health care provider and a scientist.”
After graduation, he was drafted into the Army with orders to ship out to Vietnam. Not long before his scheduled departure, he was told to report to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he served for three years.
In 1968, he was back at UCLA, where he’d spent two years as a medical resident. By the early 1980s, he had a joint appointment in the departments of medicine and pharmacology while working with the International Olympic Committee to set up a lab for the 1984 Olympics.
In 2003, his team developed the test for the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG. Nicknamed “the Clear,” THG is a steroid that has sunk the careers of a handful of world-class athletes.
“Don is passionate about his work and he has the kind of dedication that you see in someone who sees his work as his life’s mission,” says Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, an ethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y., who has worked with Catlin for 15 years. “He is brilliant and he is committed to doing good in his life.”
Catlin played a central role in the investigation of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), an inquiry into steroid use that has ensnared track star Marion Jones and baseball’s Barry Bonds.
He was the lead expert witness at the BALCO proceedings in 2003, explaining the intricacies of performance-enhancing drugs to the grand jurors.
“For 20 years, I was pulling teeth to get people to pay attention,” says Catlin. “BALCO opened it all up.”
In Catlin’s office, his Beijing Olympics credentials and an Olympics hat hang from the corner of a board covered with chemical equations. In a downstairs laboratory, researchers work with specimens by the OrbiTrap mass spectrometer, rented for $1 a year from the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Another piece of testing equipment is on loan from a manufacturer.
“It’s a different paradigm from the UCLA lab, which was supported by the fees paid for the drug testing,” says Catlin. “We need all the grants and equipment loans we can get. But no matter how many fancy instruments you have, people are the key. Otherwise you just have a bag of bolts.”
As a member of the International Olympic Committee Medical Commission, he oversaw blood testing for human growth hormone at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, his 14th Olympics since he founded the UCLA lab. His Olympics work is a labor of love and professional dedication. Every two years since 1984, he has taken a month off to volunteer at the world’s top athletics event.
He keeps in shape riding his mountain bike in the Santa Monica Mountains on circuits that include a 2.5-mile climb. It’s his way to combat the inevitable loss of muscle mass that’s part of the aging process.
“It happens in your mid-60s, and I know that I’m slipping,” he says with a grin. “I know the milestones on the ride up there. But cycling makes me feel good. And I’m usually the oldest guy up in the mountains.”
David McKay Wilson is a New York–based freelance writer.
