Focus 580; Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping

In this part of focus 580 we will be exploring some of the history of testosterone synthetic testosterone and its growing and sometimes hidden influence in our culture. Over the past 70 years synthetic testosterone was first produced in 1935. And from that time virtually to this it has promised at least some people would say it has promised restored youth recharged sexual potency and enhanced athletic ability. But of course it also raises a lot of significant questions particularly the question of how it is and where it is we draw that line between something that is a legitimate medical therapy and something that qualifies as performance enhancement. Our guest for the program this morning is John Hoberman. He's the author of a recently published book that explores some of this territory the title of his book is testosterone dreams rejuvenation aphrodesiac doping. The book is published by the universe. We have California press he has written a number of books that look at athletics and performance and performance enhancement among his books Darwin's athletes how

sport has damaged black America and preserved the myth of race. That's his most recent I believe published in 1997. Others include Mortal Engines the science of performance and the dehumanization of sport. The Olympic crisis sport politics and the moral order and sport and political ideology. And he's joining us this morning by telephone. Questions are certainly welcome as we continue through this hour of the show. The only thing we ask of callers is that people just try to be brief and we ask that so that we can keep the program moving and get in as many different people as possible. But if you'd like to call in have questions have a comment. You're certainly welcome to do that if you're in Champaign Urbana where we are the number to call is 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We do also have a toll free line in that one. Good anywhere that you can hear us. Illinois Indiana. Fact if you'd be listening on the internet as long as you're in the United States you may use the toll free line that is eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5.

Again three three three W I L L and toll free 800. Two two two. Wy Hello Professor Hoberman Hello. Good morning thanks very much for talking with us today for inviting me to maybe two sort of basic points just to talk about a little bit at the beginning here and then we can get in to these questions in somewhat greater depth I guess one of the things that should be said is that ever since virtually ever since its testosterone was first synthesised 1935 almost from the start as has been the case with other things over time it was it was said at least by some people to be a kind of all purpose tonic or virtual miracle cure or something that was recognized very soon as being potential muscle builder but also something that for older men would restore their sexual potency would make them more productive more energetic. And I think in the book you make the argument that it was

represent people would have represented as the VI Agora of its day. So from that time and still today people argue have argued still argue for testosterone in that same kind of way. Yeah that's true. The idea the early publicity for the drug in the 1940s focused more on its potential as an aphrodisiac the discovery that this was a really potent muscle builder especially in conjunction with training was for discovery. The 1950s the steroid epidemic in elite sports takes off during the 1960s and half a century later. We've got the most recent version of it. This is a drug that is to say the androgenic drugs the testosterone or synthetic anabolic steroid derivatives are demonstrating a real power to appeal

to a variety of groups of people who find them useful and attractive as well as. Legitimate therapeutic in certain medical senses this is a drug with charisma and that's I guess I don't know if this is oversimplifying the point but but just so people make sure they see the connection. The kind of performance enhancing drugs that are so much at issue today in athletics the anabolic steroids. Essentially what they are is a not exactly a synthetic testosterone but what happens is when you take them and you put them into your body what happens is they get made into testosterone so in a sense that what that's what you're doing it's a way to augment or to supplement the testosterone that your body would naturally produce but both men and women do naturally produce it. Right. Men producing a lot a lot more than women which makes these males. Hormone drugs more potent in female athletes relatively

speaking than they are in males. The other sort of general point other than than the fact that for going back some time now people have been have been boosting testosterone and there has been interest in it for these various reasons I guess the other thing that's a fairly consistent sort of a story again going back to the time that it was first synthetic to tosses testosterone first produce was that there was this recognition at least on some people's parts that there could be a very lucrative market for this product. Yeah I noticed for example that BusinessWeek magazine reported 1945 that synthetic testosterone was potentially a very lucrative drug. One of the developments that I describe in the book is in a sense something that did not happen in 1945 the popular science journalist named Paul De Preist published a book called the male hormone. It is reviewed in Newsweek it's reviewed in Time magazine.

He is he is a well-known figure yet he is an attempt to mainstream synthetic. Time strong drugs for very large numbers of aging males he was 55 when the book was published in 1945 and he was a great believer in it. What the book argues is that despite the Christ publicity despite the effort during the early 1940s in particular by pharmaceutical companies to persuade doctors that this was a male menopause drug whose time had come. American society was so sexually conservative in its use mores that this simply could not ignite as a mass therapy as a as Africa for the masses. And what I argue in the book is that we had to wait half a century between the mid 40s in the mid 90s for

teens that think the sexual. The mores of American society trains to the point that the idea of providing a hormone aphrodisiac if you will to very large numbers of people especially young people in the mid 90s. This catches on and you start seeing the cover stories on testosterone such as the word Newsweek published for the first time in 1996 and for the past decade. This is a drug that has been taking off medical prescriptions for example have almost tripled between 1999 and last year we have a caller here someone on the cell phone so I will not make them wait will bring them into the conversation. Line number one. Well I guess the question is can their recent biological study indicate that they often don't have they

are found on the development of the ADA a peculiarly attractive gender difference and I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about that and it's really about how bad translate into an effect on. Babies that are born either to mothers who are taking FOSTER Well or two fathers who took it and I don't mean an album Archaean. That's so out of the past but in terms of fundamental changes in the DNA and because I think I think there's a potential I don't know that but I'm asking dangerous for people to take. To go in the going to happen to children they bear later in life and all that. Thank you.

All right well thanks for the calls the question clear. Yes it is I cannot write for much expertise in response to this particular question but one thing I have seen being is that when for example you have a male and female twins. And I believe that in that situation some testosterone in the inside the mother inside that sack can be influence to some extent. I see the muscular development of the female infant in such a way as to make that a more athletic group than would otherwise have been the case as a matter of fact I can recall from. My own children styled me a pair of twins who demonstrated both of them male and female of extraordinary athletic ability so I don't doubt that there are entry uterine affects on fetuses by testosterone or especially a super

normal level of testosterone. As a matter of fact one of the sort of pseudo medical proposals that I describe in the book is a suggestion some 20 30 years ago by a German scientist that testosterone injections given to mothers in order believe it or not to prevent the development of homosexuality in males see it. The idea being that that homosexuality was in effect a male hormone deficiency that could be remedied by a supplementary testosterone intreat intriguer and we delivered. This is a proposal that has not gone anywhere. It in fact it harkens back to the approaches experiments in concentration camps for example that were that involved giving supplementary

testosterone in the early 1940s to homosexuals in a concentration camp on account of the Nazis were against homosexuality and their version of the dream that homosexuality was a male hormone deficiency that could be cured. But I cannot comment on the specific effects of giving extra testosterone say to a father who is just going to a producer going out with a woman that doesn't sound to me especially since there wouldn't seem to be any gene line trans transmission of traits there that that would be particularly affected. I don't doubt that putting extra testosterone inside a mother who is bearing a rather more fetuses could very likely affect the development of children but I cannot comment on that with medical expertise. It isn't is it not also the case that here in the United States there there were

there were times when there were physicians that advocated using testosterone as a treatment. We'll put that in quotes as a treatment for homosexuality. Yes. In the 1940s and these are reputable medical journal articles I describe them in the book what they discover of course is that administering extra testosterone to the male homosexual. He's not going to produce a reversal of gender orientation quite the contrary. One of the almost comical observations that appear in can read and write these articles is that it's pointed to risk to a sense of intensifying the sexual desire towards other males because that happens to be that person's orientation. Let's talk with someone else this is a caller here locally in Champaign wine 1. Hello. Yes just a technical clarification. I believe during the set of David that you said that the book is about synthetic testosterone. Yes and my question is

by the term synthetic testosterone is it meant testosterone that is identical to what the body produces only it's made in a laboratory. Or are we talking about other molecules that are act like or are intended to act like natural testosterone but that are different from what the body produces. That's a good question if in fact the answer is both. It deals with the synthesis of the testosterone molecule. The basic testosterone molecule and the anabolic steroid derivatives which represent in effect the innovations on modifications of the basic testosterone molecule that use a den to fight as such. I've seen one scientific article that said hypothetically you could have you know given the way that you can modify the basic structure with certain with certain groups at certain points on the ring something up

to maybe 600 possible. Variations on the testosterone molecule which is one of the reasons that we read in the paper about Siner steroids about potentially undetectable anabolic steroid drugs that then are assumed by experts to be out there because the detection instruments have not been calibrated to detect molecules of that precise mass. So in effect we're dealing with the basic testosterone and derivatives that molecule that are modified for at least a couple of million purposes. Number one you can try to magnify the so-called anabolic or protein slash muscle building effect of the drug or you know you can engineer the molecule in such a way as to make it more or less potent as an entrant genic drug which is the same as the sex hormone or other modifications that can make it either

shorter or longer lasting or persisting in the body which is of interest. Two athletes who want to use this stuff and not be detected they will stop using. They will say well you know what are not being tested positive in certain events or if I'm randomly tested I've got to stop using the truck and let it rush out of my system. X number of days or weeks before testing they're OK. I guess there are at least two main arenas of use of these substances. One the sports performance enhancing one that you were just discussing and the other a treatment in quotes are not for older people. And my lay reading suggests that the use of. Forms of testosterone that are not identical to what's produced by the body

is associated with all sorts of non unwanted side effects. More than those that are met by using testosterone that's identical to what's in the body and so it would seem worthwhile in the discussion to make clear which is being talked about at any given time. Yeah I agree. I seen the look there is a long list of side effects that have gotten a lot of attention lately. The a.m. a campaign that has now been federalized in effect taken over by the Office of National Drug Control Policy that runs the decades old war on drugs has been emphasizing the long list of. Possible medical hazards one of the problems is that there is a lot of confusion in the coverage that we read and it's not

easily resolved confusion regarding exactly how dangerous these drugs are one of the problems is that drugs with a 65 year history of legitimate medical uses have been caught in the crossfire of a war on drugs that tends not to distinguish between two different kinds of drugs in recreational drugs. So proud for some performance enhancing drugs some of which such as stuff thrown in spirits can have psychogenic effects and in some individuals have a profound altering effect the steroid rage being the most famous of them but my point is that we have an unprecedented public discussion androgenic drugs in the media these days fueled of course by the BALCO baseball scandal

and one of the casualties. This debate is a really reasoned and careful assessment of how dangerous the drugs are. I mean this is just an effective sociological point that has to do with the contest between I would call the demonizing of drugs which have a number of legitimate medical uses as opposed to the arguments that you will hear from you know the bodybuilding community so-called and various you're right advocates that the potential dangers of the drugs have been greatly exaggerated. We were still working this. How can the public discussion final comment especially where the legitimate medical uses are concerned. One tends to hear a lot more about

the synthetic forms that are different from that produced by the body than about the actual so called bio identical testosterone because the synthetic forms can be patented and sold for a lot more money. Yeah that's an interesting point. The pharmaceutical companies as we know Didn't have been interested in these trucks ever since 1940 which looked in a medical journal like endocrinologist and or the Journal of Clinical Endocrinologists and you've seen full page ads from two or three country excuse me companies that were producing well in those days the synthetics that were being promoted in the journals were testosterone propounding and that's it. This test run which was administered orally and I guess it still is. But in any case for 65 years now

you can look back and see the pharmaceutical companies trying to establish a variety of markets for these drugs and only in the past 10 years or so have they been getting traction and watching the anti-aging market expand in a rather dramatic way which accounts for much of the increase in the number of legal prescriptions written which as of last year was just over 2 million. And for listeners who might be interested it's worth observing that natural testosterone is available now. Thank you very much. You know you can you can get it at the pharmacy if you've got a doctor's prescription or of course the Internet is now the drug market among other things. Well I guess I'm just I don't I don't know how much further I want to carry this point because we're getting perhaps more into medical issues. Then maybe we should but I guess now and in

my mind I'm a little confused is we know that there are a number of problematic side effects associated with these anabolic steroids that we're talking about that have been so much of an issue now and used by athletes and by other people who are interested in in bodybuilding essentially is is it the case though that a synthetic testosterone if indeed what we're talking about is something that is like that that's produced by the body. In all respects except that it's made in a laboratory that that that doesn't not have the same negative side effects of the anabolic steroids do. Now we can't be sure because one of dosing in and spending debate that's developed over the past 65 years since the Strokes went in. Sort of primitive medical experimentation unlink 30s around 1940. Well what do you do with the individual whose testosterone level is

normal as opposed to sub normal. And for a long time and including today there is a kind of a medical consensus that you do not want to boost the individual above the so-called normal level. This can be difficult to establish as a single number and in fact doesn't mean the male testosterone level rise in force in the course of a 24 hour thing. But what you see in the medical literature and say over this entire period of time is a lot of caution with regard to raising test asteroid levels above what is roughly defined as normal. The principal medical concern at this point is the possibility that you're going to promote the growth and expansion of prostate cancer that is going to. Feed off of the extra testosterone in fact reducing testosterone levels even

castration is one surgical therapy for prostate cancer because the assumption here is that the these bad cancer cells are in effect being driven by the structural that's in circulation. But you didn't think the latest version of this by the way is the Procter and Gamble initiative to put on the market a testosterone patch intended for women suffering from a so-called loss of sexual desire because of the surgical menopause they've had their ovaries removed and that means that their testosterone levels are going to drop something if we restore it. It's going to do something positive for sexual desire but that is apparently the case at least in some people. But here again in the year 2004 2005

one encounters this this cautionary maxim that number one you don't want to boost it above normal number two and this we've heard for years is that there's really no point that you just know. As to your money that one day in other words one of the the most significant thing the barrel directed with ideas that has been in play since these drugs have been available for clinical use. Yes is there any reason to boost the testosterone level human organization beyond what you quote unquote naturally produced in the absence of let's say. Testicular cancer there's going to remove the testicles medically and thereby require a synthetic testosterone replacement therapy. So this is this has been a big issue now for more than half a century and it's still out

here as a pharmaceutical company or in this case Procter and Gamble with its pharmaceutical arm attempts to put out that testosterone skin patch for the purpose of purportedly relieving a sexual disorder that is the result of surgery. Let me get our guest in. Have a caller we'll get right to John Hoberman is talking with us about his recent book testosterone dreams rejuvenation efford Asia doping that's the subtitle. It is published by the University of California Press. He's on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin and he has written a number of books that have to do with this particular issue one way or another particularly looking at athletics and performance enhancement questions welcome 3 3 3 8 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Well our caller changed their mind they're on our line number one. Let me just ask you a question one of the things that I wanted to ask just to satisfy my curiosity here in the course of the

conversation is how it is that this connects with your academic background and interests because you are in fact a professor in the department of Germanic studies at the Austin. And it is very clear that there has been this consistent interest that that you have had if you look at the titles of the other books that you. Have written. How did you get interested in writing about this particular subject. I sort of converted to a sports studies as a major My major field of research. About 30 years ago and have published a series of books that attempt to look at the sports world as a model of the larger rolled out there were to study the sports room for the purpose of understanding the politics of use a political ideology. The Olympic movement is a model of international organizations I've learned a tremendous amount about international organizations

function by studying human picketing for example. About 20 years ago I became very interested in the whole open performance enhancement that is judged to be legitimate. And some forms illegitimate in other forms and I must say I simply have been unable to let go of this topic. I think the reason for that that I seen the sports doping you choose in our society is currently wrestling with in an unprecedented way as a kind of a stalking horse for bigger and in fact even more important biomedical developments that are going to dominate the 21st century so far as to what kinds of human

organisms are going to be considered. To be desirable even tolerable. What about humans and animals. Hybridization which as has been done in certain forms in laboratories. So here is what. What is a human being used here. A basic standard necessary definition of what a human being is. Such fact this creature should or should not be modified by a variety of technologies and the technology that I've spent my time studying primarily as hormone therapy. But what you learn in the course of looking into the background of hormone doping in sports is that it is just one aspect of a much larger

picture. That being the medical. Mention goes back about 65 years. The Athletic Union only goes back about about 15 years. They don't become really influential in modern sport as we know it until the sixties or so and and now we've got a real problem not simply because there are very significant numbers of elite athletes who are ready willing and able to use the strengths to boost their performances but also because they appeal to a much greater number of people who are outside the world of elite sport and these developments just keep pouring out of the news reports to the most recent being having to do with teenage girls

and even pre teen age girls where you have kids. Middle school kids high school kids who are females and anabolic steroid use are estimated only in order of 5 to 7 percent. The purpose is not in most cases to boost athletic performance in high school. Sports teams it is rather personal appearance. What kind of a body are you going to be able to display on the beach. These kids grow up in a society where you cannot escape the advertising for erectile dysfunction drugs. You cannot escape the advertising for Botox and other cosmetic agents that are supposed to improve a woman's appearance. Our kids are marinating in an enormous mass of advertising that are that advertisements that deliver the message that the human body and its capacity for sexual experience its

capacity for athletic self expression of these capacities are modifiable through pharmaceutical products. The fact that it is not as simple as that gets lost and the result is a growing number of children who soon enhancement drugs have a legitimate role to play in modern life. I saw a report from a French research outfit an important French research outfit reported that a majority of 6 year old children in France now and soon to be elite athletes need struts. Performing adequately in the country that invented the Tour de France the most drug soaked athletic event in the history of the world. It's hardly surprising the children coming away with this particular value system. In the book you make the point that in the period just after World War 2

there were people who felt that testosterone synthetic testosterone might be poised to take off as a mass therapy for four ageing men. As I said earlier the phrase you used some people thought of it as the day that it had potential for it as an aphrodisiac for men and for women. And also there were some people that thought it could be used as a treatment for homosexuality. And which has largely been discredited but the other kinds of uses for testosterone. The other kinds of enhancements. It didn't take off right then but it did eventually it took a little while. The question I guess I met is now when you talk about is that the role to which initially the. Hesitance the unease of the medical community of most doctors. How is it that turned around. I think that the reproach one of the reasons that it did not take off in the in the 1940s was

that doctors were just really unsure about it and that perhaps the reason that we have now seen the kind of testosterone boom that we started seeing perhaps in the 90s and perhaps even more so if you look at popular culture and how it's written about say beginning in 2000 that the reason things perhaps changed is that doctors changed their mind and became much more willing to write prescriptions for these things for their patients. I would say that their view is that that's an accurate depiction of the last half century to a point. But I want to I want to emphasize a couple of points first of all. I don't think that the credit or discredit or whatever for that. Revolutionary development in attitudes towards these drugs that in 1995 Roughly speaking they are an acceptable mainstream aphrodesiac for aging people in

particular whereas in 1945 that was not the case. I would not point primarily to doctors changing their minds. I would point primarily to a series of enormous social developments that made Dr. Strange their mind and made doctors adapt to patient expectations and that of course have a lot of relevance to how much money the physician is going to make whether that patient is satisfied with what he or she is getting from the physician. When you read for example the letters that physicians wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association back in the 30s the 40s even the. What in C is a socially conservative attitude toward human sexuality toward human sexual self-expression. What I found in a number of these letters and I did not find any

sort of evidence to suggest that that this is not a valuable anecdotal evidence is that the idea that aging people were entitled to a lifetime of sexual gratification more or less did not exist. Half a century ago he said I would be 55 certainly did not exist in 1945. We can see a doctor saying look you know you've had the sexual career that you've had. You have had children and. Since the human organism deteriorates after the age of 40 or so what you're facing here is not some kind of syndrome or or disorder. What you're facing is the normal aging process. And that this we're talking you know 50 60 years ago the idea that Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And it was very important when

doctors even thought about improving people's sex lives and soon that these were married people that this was going to be sex in the context of marriage. This is one of the aspects of what I'm calling social conservatism that the idea that a physician would be ambitious on behalf of improving the sex lives of people over 40 or 50 let alone 60 or 70 is it that really would have counted as an eccentricity at this point. But then you get the 60 votes you get the influence of the contraceptive pill you get the human potential movement of the 1960s and the 1970s. You get a very powerful feminist movement that dates in western societies I think since about the early 70s or so that's how it would be and you have very powerful social movements in other words that are creating it. Text in which people are going to think about human potential in new ways.

And frankly more demanding ways. This is going to create an enormous market it's going to create an appetite for certain kinds of human fulfillment that once upon a time had been imagined to be the preserve of a rather small number of people. Now this is in effect a mass movement. And in that sense I feel that social movements such as the Sexual Revolution so-called feminism or the spread of psychotherapeutic ethos to vastly larger numbers of people than were getting the benefits of the sort of treatment back in the 40s and the 50s this created a context in which physicians respond to patients. MARTIN We have needs and demands in a way that patients simply did not 50 years ago.

You were talking a bit earlier about your concerns about the direction that we might be moving as a society that we are becoming more tolerant and indeed more embracing of the notion of. Formants in a hands moment over a broad range of people and activities and encouraging people to think past talking about athletes to thinking about all of the kinds of things that we might do particularly using pharmaceuticals and supplements and things that are available over the counter and so forth that that when you think about it actually come under the heading of performance enhancement we may not think about it that way but what it is. What exactly is wrong with that. And is this a matter of something that we should be concerned of. Overall or is this a matter of degree and we could make the argument that maybe. Too much is bad but a little is not so bad.

That's an extremely important question and I guess I would come down on the side of those who would say that it is a matter of degree. This I mean you know I've spent 20 years working on athletic doping among other things and my own personal disposition is that I'm not interested in watching. I mean I follow track and field ever since I was a kid that was a long time ago. You know I was a runner for a long long time. I'm not interested in what I would define as travesty performances that are that is simply not what I want out of watching a track meet for example. But this is a question of foundations and cultural choices. There are apparently lots of people who want to see a lot of home runs regardless of what it takes. And there are survey data to back up that particular

observation regarding the feelings Americans have about the propriety or impropriety of performance enhancing drugs used by professional athletes like mainly baseball players. There's there's quite a bit of a time. Reverence for performance enhancement of that kind. But this is this is really the the key question in a very very difficult question. OK so I spend lots of time observing the drug habits and values of say elite athletes. What if an elite athlete doesn't happen unfortunately but it should turns around and says All right professor what would you do if you woke up one day and were presented with the following situation. Either you take this kind of psychoactive drugs or you were competitors in the intellectual business are going to surge past you

because they will be taking this drug. They will be able to think faster theyll be able to think deeper. Their publication rate is going to soar and your 6.2 leg. What if the outside observer somebody like me were in effect put in the predicament of the shotput or the great example because everybody with any sense knows that anabolic steroids produce a much longer shot points than people who aren't on those drugs. There's huge documentation for this so it's a good example you know you have the last 30 40 years you couldn't function at the top of the shot put in games without using steroids you could say the same. Think about about weightlifting. Just your open secrets. So these are people in a fix. What if your gift in life. Usenet's little gift and you're looking at the competition. Take drugs and simply run away from what you know

now that predicament is your predicament you are not a physical performer you are mental slash intellectual performer this is a very discomforting question that I think people like me have got to confront and be honest about what is too little what is too much what about the U.S. Air Force policy of a country requiring certain combat pilots who are going to be encountering a lot of team taking Fetterman. I've seen the document. These guys have to sign and there's real pressure in there too. You can take the drug. Some physicians will say Oh my goodness you don't want to get into a pilot might have hallucinations in center center. In fact there are American parents in Afghanistan who killed four Canadians in 2001 and their sentiment consumptions wound up at their court martial as soon as an

issue. What if you can give drugs the military is very interested in cycle boosted cycle boosting of soldiers perhaps giving them a new prescription drug narcoleptic drug modafinil it sold as provisional. What if you can keep these soldiers awake for three days four days seven days so that their phone or ability to enemy fire at night when they are handicapped by 15 is what if you can relieve that with a drug to do you really want those military personnel to show up at the poor mother store and say ma'am your son died in combat. But at least he died drug free. I mean this is this is actually a plausible scenario in the world we're living in but. Needs drugs to survive.

For example the air surgeon of the U.S. Air Force published a kind of an apology for the infections they were giving pilots in 1944 saying to the American public you know we know that these drugs have a bad social reputation. But my God we've got to give them to these pirates in order to keep them alive. Seems to me the tournament performance enhancement. I don't think people want to fight for free. They think want to live their lives in some extreme cases. But I think it's a useful case study in the kind of thinking that one must apply situation to sit and wait and what about the stimulants rash amphetamine epidemic that is currently raging on American college campuses with lots of kids getting their hands on Ritalin and Adderall in order not simply to stay up at night which you can do with caffeine

but. What I am seeing in this increasing number of reports the recent show about this on our local news just the other night and there's quite a bit in print. What the students say is that not only I can stay up at night. I can focus in a way I couldn't before. I simply don't want to go back to getting things drug free when I can use Adderall that maybe I get from my roommate because he's gotten a prescription for it. I don't want to get these drug free I want to use the drug and get in a this predicament this one from that performance enhancement that you brought our attention to is by no means limited to the athletic field. This is going to be. And expanding to one of the great humanistic problems of the 21st century and that's

why I think it's useful. Starting athletic doping problems athletic doping scandals. Where's the value system that can counsel self-restraint credibly to people who may feel that for the purpose of earning a living whether you get a professional cyclist who's got to get through twenty five hundred miles of the Tour de France or whether it's a kid who's under pressure to race grade point average. Where is the Archimedean point where we're used that leverage point where we can stand credibly and counsel people to exercise self-restraint. These are the the pharmacological pates that are becoming increasingly available. We're almost out of time. Very quickly in about a minute. I am interested just in one small piece of this because of the attention that performance enhancement drugs have gotten lately in sport and the fact that our representatives professional athletics the United States have been

and front of Congress there is this concern perhaps not so much for those athletes as it is for kids who look at them using those drugs. And we have now seen greater use of these kind of drugs by college level athletes by high school low level athletes. Do you think that the fact that it's getting in. It's going to change anything. I think they're going to be new laws passed by Congress that that demonstrates I think a very deficient understanding of the scope of the issues that they've they've chosen to get involved with. For example there is a subcommittee chairman one of these House committees names Cliff Stearns. He's a Republican from Florida he's the author of the currently proposed worst the Drug-Free Sports Act of 2005 the city Terrytoons 62. He said just the other day professional sports expect world

class performances from their players and these athletes should be subject to room for class testing standards unquote. REP. I think the representative is overlooking is that if you are going to preserve the demand for what he calls one class performances. And you had better be ready to endure a great deal of doping. The more sensible solution would be to try to recast our sports culture in such a way that you don't have people who are doing everything humanly possible including using pharmacological aids to produce these performance and then say and we're going to spend millions on it. You know gas chromatograph and everything to care if you dared to use drugs no risk you're creating such an overwhelming incentive to use drugs that it is pointless to say we expect from you replies performances.

And then we're going to catch any so-called cheaters with ropes and text. We're going to have to leave it at that. The good book if you'd like to read it we've talked about testosterone dreams. It's published by the University of California Press by our guest John Hoberman from the University of Texas Austin Professor thanks very much. Thank you very much.