In 2011, a University of South Florida researcher called Dominic D’Agostino came to Patrick Arnold with a request. He needed a molecule synthesised. The molecule was a ketone ester, a compound that, taken orally, would metabolise in the body into acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyric acid, the two endogenous ketones the body produces when it fully metabolises fat. The military, Arnold told Unfiltered in December 2023, was the reason. Organisations like the US Office of Naval Research and DARPA, which fund applied research for soldiers, wanted something that could help Navy SEAL divers using rebreather equipment. Under high-pressure oxygen at depth, the divers were at risk of seizures. Children with epilepsy already used the ketogenic diet to manage seizures, and it was very effective. The ester would deliver the same biochemistry without the diet.
Arnold made the molecule. D’Agostino tested it on rats, administering the ester by oral gavage before placing the animals in a pressurised oxygen chamber. The rats that received the ester lasted, Arnold said, “like three times longer than the control rats.” That was the proof of concept the Navy was looking for. What the Navy did with it afterwards, Arnold could not say. “Don’t ask me if the Navy SEALs are taking the ketone ester,” he told Unfiltered. “I wouldn’t know.”
What he made next was more consequential, commercially. Arnold went back to D’Agostino with a different proposal. “Dom, I’m interested if you could help me test out some alternatives that could be sold as nutritional supplements.” The alternatives were BHB salts, beta-hydroxybutyrate, the same endogenous ketone the ester produced, this time in salt form. The salts already existed as a research chemical, but no one was making them at supplement scale. Arnold developed a process to manufacture them inexpensively. He and D’Agostino designed a study around combining BHB salts with medium-chain triglycerides, an effect Arnold said “wasn’t necessarily predictable.” They patented the combination. Arnold’s company manufactured the first commercial batches through a private-label arrangement.
Champaign, Illinois, was not where Patrick Arnold expected to spend his post-BALCO years
By 2011, Arnold had served his federal prison sentence for the BALCO indictment. By the standards of high-profile drug cases, the sentence had been short. He was, in his attorney Rick Collins’s later phrasing, “the smartest, most colorful and most enigmatic character in the Golden Age of sports nutrition,” working out of Champaign, Illinois, the base for the supplement companies that had carried him through the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The chemistry that had defined his career was the same chemistry that had sent him to prison. After release, what he kept was the chemistry. The companies, the corporate vehicles, the public profile, those changed.
The BHB salts went into the supplement market through Arnold’s manufacturing operation. Then the manufacturing moved to China. Then the multi-level marketing companies arrived. “The whole market for that and the whole idea quickly got so out of hand that I wasn’t able to fully benefit,” Arnold told Unfiltered. “You develop some technology that becomes so popular that you’re forgotten as the one that introduced it, and you never get the reward you think you might deserve. That’s just the way it is.”
The chemist, in other words, had outrun the chemistry. Or the chemistry had outrun the chemist. By 2023, Arnold described his BHB-salts work in the past tense, in the resigned tone of someone who had watched a thing he had made become something he no longer owned.
The work after the salts was research-grade, low-volume, and intermittent
After the BHB salts moved to China, Arnold worked on the ketone ester itself, simplifying its synthesis. He told Unfiltered he had been able to “greatly simplify it and reduce the cost.” He was selling the ester, “a little bit, mostly to research institutions.” The company that did so was, by the time of the interview, no longer operating. “That came and went.”
The regulatory environment, Arnold told Unfiltered, had changed underneath him. The kind of work he was best at, identifying a novel compound, designing a synthesis, manufacturing at scale, selling under the dietary supplement classification, was no longer available to anyone. “I cannot introduce a novel compound, no matter if it’s ubiquitous in nature, harmless,” he said. “There is no indication that it would be harmful. I could not get any contract manufacturer of any reputation to make such a thing, because they are bound to FDA laws regarding good manufacturing practices.” Any new compound would have to go through the new dietary ingredient approval process, hundreds of thousands of dollars in safety and efficacy studies, with no guarantee of approval at the end. “That’s not feasible.”
The pathway that remained was incremental. Take an existing compound. Enhance its bioavailability. Add a synergistic ingredient. Sell it as a formulation rather than as a discovery. “That’s something anyone could do,” Arnold said. “You don’t need a background in chemistry like I do for that.”
What Patrick Arnold was working on at the end
The first thing was ketones. The second was NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, the coenzyme whose decline with age is one of the structural levers in current longevity science. Arnold took a gram of NMN every morning, primarily, he said, from a personal standpoint. “I want to be healthy and live longer.” He had experimented with apigenin and chrysin, both flavonoids known to inhibit CD38, the enzyme whose increased activity with age contributes to falling NAD levels, and was working on formulations to improve their bioavailability. He had read the literature on postpartum NAD demand and written about it himself.
The third thing was a formula. Arnold had a prototype. He had a partner. “I’m working with my old partner to see if I can move that along and get it on the market,” he told Unfiltered. He did not name the partner. He did not name the formula. Asked whether labs contacted him for work, he shook his head. “I wish. We have common contacts and associates, so you probably know of me, but outside that little small circle, which is a lot smaller than I think, I’m not very well known. I don’t have people contacting me. I would greatly welcome it. Anyone out there that wants to contact me, I’ve got time on my hands to work on stuff.”
Rick Collins, his attorney for twenty-five years, would later say that when he last saw Arnold in 2024, it was for lunch at Arnold’s family house in Connecticut. After the lunch, Arnold posted on Collins’s Facebook page: “I forgot how integral you were in my life for many years and how much we shared and experienced. We could have chatted for a week!”
The chemist who outran himself
Patrick Arnold died on 12 May 2026. The strength coach Mark Bell, on Instagram, wrote that Arnold was “the greatest chemist of our time and possibly any other.” Arnold had built three things in his career: the prohormone industry, the BALCO scandal, the exogenous ketone supplement category. Two had ended in litigation. The third had ended in his being forgotten by the market he created.
He told Unfiltered, in December 2023, that he was “not even close to” retirement. The line was an answer to a question about what came next, what he was excited about, what he was working on. The answer arrived as a confession of the gap between the career Arnold had wanted and the career he had. “I wish I’d just gone right into the chemical industry, maybe worked for a pharmaceutical company. I’d be much better off right now. I’d be looking at my retirement, and I’m not even close to that.”
He had time on his hands. The phone wasn’t ringing the way he wanted it to. The formula sat in the prototype stage. He passed away two years later.
