The chemist who designed the most consequential undetectable steroid in the history of professional sport spent the last decade of his life trying to build something else. A ketone ester for a Navy-funded research lab. BHB salts. NAD precursors. A longevity formula he was developing with an old partner. A gram of NMN every morning. When Patrick Arnold spoke to Unfiltered’s Dr Jonny Rees in December 2023, he was a chemist in the long shadow of an industry that had closed the door on the kind of work he was best at, talking about the second career he hoped was still possible.
Arnold was three chemists in one career. The first invented Andro and the prohormone category, the supplements found in Mark McGwire’s locker in 1998, and the industry his attorney Rick Collins had to defend against federal scrutiny on more than one occasion. The second made THG, “the Clear,” the designer anabolic steroid that sat at the centre of the BALCO scandal and sent Arnold to federal prison rather than to a deal that would have required him to name athletes. The third made a ketone ester for Dominic D’Agostino’s lab at the University of South Florida, which became part of a body of research the US Office of Naval Research funded for Navy SEAL diver applications, and then BHB salts, which became a supplement category Arnold watched MLMs and Chinese manufacturers capture before the science he produced could give him a second career.
Arnold spoke to Rees over video call from the United States in December 2023. Rees, a bioethics academic whose PhD examined the same WADA enhancement criteria Arnold spent his life working around, asked the questions very few journalists ever got the chance to put to Arnold. What follows is the conversation in full.
Patrick Arnold died on 12 May 2026. The Mark Bell tribute that began circulating that day called him “the greatest chemist of our time and possibly any other.” Rick Collins, his attorney for twenty-five years, called him “the smartest, most colorful and most enigmatic character in the Golden Age of sports nutrition.” The conversation that follows is what Arnold said in late 2023, when no one knew it would be the last full record.
From the lab to the locker room: how Patrick Arnold became “the Clear man”
Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. People watching this will know quite a lot about you, but I wondered if we could start with some background — how you came to develop this reputation, how you came to be involved in the things that you were involved with.
I was always a very inquisitive and curious child. I did a lot of reading of encyclopedias, scientific literature. My father kept a well-stocked library and magazines and everything. And I was very much into health and fitness as well. I eventually went to college and decided to major in chemistry. I got my degree, then I went to work. The area of chemistry that I specialised in was called synthetic organic chemistry, which is what you need to make and manufacture all kinds of organic stuff, drugs in particular is a good example.
Through various opportunities, I started making certain drugs. At first it was not what I was doing at my job, I did it on the side, and I kind of became proficient at it. I did a lot of research into pharmacology, and I learned a lot about a lot of different varieties of drugs. But in the case of this interview, performance-enhancing drugs were of interest to me, and I kind of found myself going down that trajectory that led to me developing nutritional supplements for performance enhancement, physique enhancement, health enhancement with performance in sports being the obvious application.
You actually have a background in training as well, you weren’t just a guy in a lab.
I trained, obviously, I’ve always trained in a gym and was quite into it. I was never a trainer of others. But I’m quite familiar with exercise physiology, muscle anatomy, biochemistry of the body, physiology.
That practical understanding would probably complement the theoretical and the chemistry understanding.
It was a kind of convergence of two knowledge bases, the chemistry and the practical application of exercise and sport. That kind of led me to a unique area of expertise, you might say. My little niche.
What would you say that niche was exactly?
Someone that has the knowledge to develop effective products. In the regulatory sense, there’s drugs, and there’s also nutritional supplementation, but they’re all the same thing. They’re all chemical compositions or chemical compounds designed to enhance strength, performance, health, sometimes cosmetic appearance. All those things are interlinked.
Performance enhancement, ethics, and the case for harm reduction in sport
People talk about PEDs, performance-enhancing drugs, and PIEDs, performance and image-enhancing drugs. People are very concerned about the use of drugs in sport. But in other walks of society, people are perhaps less concerned about drugs that would enhance performance. I’d love to get your thoughts on performance enhancement generally, and then as it relates to elite professional sport.
Performance enhancement can encompass a lot of things. Enhancing your strength, enhancing your ability to recover from exercise trauma. Or you can go another direction — enhancement of your mental faculties, your ability to concentrate, your ability to learn, your ability to maintain a wakeful state. One could say emotional stability that is supported by pharmaceuticals may fall into play. So you can see it’s a huge umbrella we’re speaking of.
People are not averse to using drugs. If you’re depressed, you get an antidepressant. If you have a headache, you take a pill. Why do you think, in the context of sport specifically, there are these cultural factors?
If you look at history — the ancient Greeks didn’t ban anything. They took all kinds of stuff to make you puke, probably wasn’t very healthy, but they didn’t care. They cared more about cheating in the form of throwing competition to get money. That’s the worst, and I agree that is bad.
But I think it all comes down — with modern Western society — to this old adage that it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game, which is quite farcical. I can’t think of any aspect of life where that’s true. If you’re a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or you’re one of the shareholders, or just about anything you can think of that involves money and power — first of all, no one ever practises that adage. It’s just considered that if you’re really good, it’s because you did whatever you had to do to get that way. Within reasonable confines, anything goes.
But in sports, it’s like, oh, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, stuff that’s completely harmless — other than the fact that it does confer an advantage on the user. Then that becomes a source of controversy because it forces everyone to undergo the means to enhance themselves as much as they can. Everyone would feel as though they have to take the same drugs, have the same elite trainer. Where do you stop? That’s the question. What are the things that we need to be concerned about? Is it this esoteric fairness thing, or is it the health of the athlete?
There is this win-at-all-costs culture. And it comes down to this idea of the level playing field and fairness — but the playing field is never really level. I could take any drug, experimental, have the best training, the best nutrition, and Usain Bolt would still beat me in a hundred metres. The playing field is never really totally fair.
When somebody wins, what are we looking at? Why did they win? A lot of people say if you work hard enough, you’ll win. No — first and foremost, above anything, it is your genetic predisposition. After that, yes, how hard you work, how smart you work. Your exposure to the right people that can train you, that know how to do specific training that’s better than most other people might provide. Nutritional interventions, a good nutritionist. Are you rich? Did you grow up with a rich family? Are you poor and you have to work and then train after work? That makes a big difference. Why do we suddenly say, OK, well, you can’t do that, but everything else is unfair fair?
Under WADA there are three main reasons for a substance or method to be prohibited: potential to enhance sports performance, this level playing field fairness argument, and a risk-of-harm argument. I would say the enhancement criterion — the criterion that suggests enhancement itself is a problem — that should go.
That in and of itself, if you take it at face value — where do you stop?
The phraseology in the WADA code talks about the virtuous perfection of our natural talents. It all comes down to this word virtuous.
I’m going to laugh, but it’s hard not to. There is a lot that is not virtuous about sport, even at the professional level, even at the amateur level. You either win, or you’re a winner, or you’re not even regarded. You will not profit. And when I say profit, it’s personal profit, personal performance, your reputation. But even with amateurs, there’s such a financial component you can’t remove. If you don’t win, you get nothing. A lot of times you spend all your own money to try to win and end up behind, whereas the winner gets endorsement contracts. So you could throw that virtuousness out of the window.
People are very concerned about anabolic steroids, particularly above other things — even in sports where just playing the sport, contact collision sports, is inherently risky. We’ve seen all the stuff in the US about concussions and TBI. It might lead one to conclude — hang on, how dangerous are these performance-enhancing drugs, especially in the context of sports like that where you get major injuries?
It’s rare you ever get an objective discussion of this, because there are so many falsehoods that have been perpetuated for decades. We could just take anabolic steroids. They’re going to give you a heart attack, you’ll die in five years. There are certain side effects or certain dangers, just like with anything, any drug you take.
When you look at it objectively, especially for an athlete who has to be in very good shape, who has to perform an event — it’s not very common or likely that person’s going to suffer any major harm. A competitive athlete is not a bodybuilder. The 275-pound guy with 4% body fat, that’s not a healthy thing. But that guy doesn’t care about his health. If he did a sprint on that stage, he’d probably drop dead.
For an athlete, a track athlete in particular, a sprint athlete who seems to really get the most from an anabolic steroid drug — they can’t take very much. If they take too much, their muscle tone goes too high, they become too tight, they get a torn hamstring. So they actually take pretty minor doses. But these people are also so genetically gifted that just that little enhancement takes them so far. It really is an edge. A huge edge. But you cannot use the argument that it is dangerous or unhealthy to them to justify the ban. If you’re going to use that one alone, that is not sufficient.
People need to remember that most of these drugs were developed and are still used in some contexts as medicines.
They were developed for children and women, even. A lot of these anabolic steroids that are the milder ones, that still work quite well.
Less androgenic. And now we have this whole industry of TRT and HRT — testosterone replacement therapy, hormone replacement therapy. They are used safely, or relatively safely. To use Chris Bell’s example, vitamin C has some risks — nothing is totally safe. If we took another drug — painkillers, for example — they could actually be more dangerous. The addiction potential is probably higher.
The addictive potential is a big deal. If you become addicted, you start using larger amounts, you could suffer respiratory failure from an opioid. Maybe you take a pill and it’s got fentanyl in it and you’re dead.
The opioid epidemic is in the US, and it’s a problem here too. People will be so concerned about steroids, but then painkillers — there’s greater harm that’s clearly demonstrable. And yet athletes aren’t vilified for painkillers as much as for steroids.
This supports the argument that we should be concerned about harm reduction. There are different methods of doping, some of which don’t involve drugs — such as blood doping. We should be concerned: which of these interventions is harmful to the athlete and which are not? Before you go further than that, let’s eliminate the ones that are clearly harmful. This is for the good of everyone, and we can present an argument that is quite convincing. Then you’re left with these other substances which generally can be used to enhance performance and are not dangerous. So what do we do with those? What are the justifications for banning those?
WADA gives three rationales — enhancement, spirit of sport and fairness, and health. It’s a two-out-of-three approach. But if the health approach goes out of the window, or if you can make the argument that regulation could even make these things healthier, because anything done behind the scenes is arguably less safe…
When you allow for open discussion and you allow for doctors to be involved, people will use these things in a healthy manner and not suffer the risks. If you sweep it under the carpet and people are just going to use them willy-nilly without any guidance, that can be dangerous.
You’ve got to think — is it possible to allow people to use certain things and monitor them? Just monitor certain health markers, make sure there’s nothing going on in their body that indicates a toxic reaction or some long-term effect. Then that athlete has no health-based reason to be banned from performing.
Elite athletes are already tested a lot. There’s the athlete biological passport, which measures blood values over time and looks for deviations. We could use that technology to measure health markers as well. Very heavy training, lots of competition, stressful life, travel — it’s all going to reduce things like testosterone. You can make the argument that there’s a TRT case, a hormone replacement case, for augmenting it.
When you present it that way, not only are you talking about preventing health problems — you’re talking about supporting interventions that could help the health of an athlete because of the deleterious effects of heavy training.
Inside BALCO: the Clear, THG, and the syringe that broke the case
One of the things you created, which as I understand was a novel compound, is this substance called the Clear, THG.
There were actually three versions of the Clear. The first was a steroid developed by Wyeth Labs. It did reach human testing. I don’t think it was ever actually approved as a drug. It was unrecognisable for the testing methods of the time.
The next one was a compound somewhat related to that — called THG. That was an actual novel compound, never seen before. I created that compound. That was the one most people are familiar with, because by the time the BALCO thing came to light, that was the one everyone was using. And there were a lot more athletes than anyone ever knows about that were using these things. The scope of it went way beyond BALCO and the athletes that were part of that.
The third one was another compound called desoxymethyltestosterone, or madol. That was used post-BALCO for maybe a couple of years. Today I’ve completely got out of the whole thing.
BALCO — the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative — had a huge amount of media coverage. It implicated a lot of famous athletes. Victor Conte was also very much involved. Did you think about the ethical implications?
I’ll put it this way. When I first got into it, I was working with people who were not world-known top-level elite athletes. They competed on a high level, but maybe they were ranked sixth, seventh in their nation or in the world. With my compounds, they quickly rose to the upper echelons of whatever sport they were in. Mostly me sending stuff to various athletes that found me somehow around the world. Sometimes trainers as well. We’d get the same very impressive response.
I didn’t feel bad about that, because when these people garnered these benefits, they came back to me in the most appreciative manner. I didn’t feel as though I was — it didn’t feel bad to me. I felt as though I may have been helping out someone, helping them reach that elite level, that didn’t have the connections or the knowledge to dope as it was at the time. That was not easy to do — you’d have to take certain drugs, get off at a certain time. These people did not have that sophistication or technology, and I enabled them to jump up into that upper level.
When I started working with Victor Conte, he was getting world champions in whatever sport. These people — first of all, I never talked to these world champions, I talked to Victor — but I’m quite aware that they would take these drugs and they would kick everyone’s ass, but they would always tell themselves, oh, it was me and my hard training. They would be unappreciative or not even want to acknowledge the elephant in the room, that was in large part due to these undetectable drugs.
Victor Conte, as I understand it, kind of tried to keep you as a secret resource.
Yeah, he did. When we were working together, he wouldn’t reveal my identity, which was fine with me — I didn’t want to be revealed. But he referred to this guy called “the Clear Man” — the Clear Man, in the Midwest or something.
After he got caught, he tried to exploit the media attention. I disappeared from the picture. These were his drugs, so to speak. He wouldn’t talk about any contribution of me or anyone else. There’s a lot of other people that helped him out too. He had secret people working in the USADA labs. He had people that knew the top WADA people that would have lunch with them and then go back to Victor. And of course he had me. He didn’t even know about any of these drugs — these undetectable steroids were being sold before I even met Victor Conte. I introduced them to him. But that’s just the kind of guy he is. And I don’t let it really bother me.
Don Catlin, the head of the lab, thought you were some kind of a genius, because when they tested it, it just kind of faded away. They couldn’t actually highlight anything.
They used to use a technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry. In gas chromatography, the compound goes into this inlet port, which is very high temperature, very low pressure. A lot of thermally labile compounds will disintegrate in the injection port and not make it to the column — which is where it’s separated out — and then to the detector. So you just have a bunch of small fragments of a molecule that never get detected by that method. That’s why they switched to liquid chromatography mass spectrometry — because it was at room temperature and you could see everything.
So that’s how the Clear didn’t test positive.
That’s a secondary benefit of its undetectability. First and foremost, the compound itself would not show up even if it did get to the detector unmolested. And on top of that, it wouldn’t even make it to the detector because it’s just destroyed upon injection into the instrument.
Even though it was two essentially other steroids combined.
This whole thing with Victor — they discovered THG because he had a track coach, Trevor Graham, who Victor had a falling out with. Of course, his fight cost me my freedom. He’s just the way he was. I don’t think he really gave a damn about anyone else. The guy ended up sending a sample into the lab, and they looked at it in a fashion where it didn’t fall apart, and they were like, oh my God.
If that had never happened, they would never have stumbled across it — because they would have kept using gas chromatography and it would have kept breaking down. Even if they were looking for telltale signs of a designer steroid — if you didn’t know the exact structure of it, they would never have known. You can’t even tell that there is a steroid-like compound coming through the system.
So it was only the tip-off that created the entire thing.
Yeah. I probably would have stopped. I was going to stop selling this stuff anyway, because it was becoming way too ubiquitous. I said, this can’t go on forever. Someone’s going to — and of course it didn’t go on. Because ultimately someone’s going to tell on someone else.
Prison, the law, and the loophole that didn’t save Patrick Arnold
Hypothetical, speculation question — what if these laws and regulations didn’t exist? What would you have done? Would you have done anything differently?
If there weren’t the doping regulations, if athletes weren’t subject to WADA or USADA or whatever country’s doping associations’ testing, then there would have been no market for developed undetectable steroids — because you wouldn’t need anything to be undetectable, because there wouldn’t be any doping testing. That’s my quick answer.
Could you talk a bit about the legal ramifications — in your case it was interesting.
When I was arrested or indicted, I was indicted with counts that were not appropriate — distribution of controlled substance, for instance. Anabolic steroids were controlled substances. The compounds I developed, although in a pharmacological class they were anabolic steroids, in a legal class they were not. They were not Schedule III controlled substances. In that class, the compound has to be the exact compound that is scheduled. These compounds were analogues.
In Schedule I and Schedule II, there’s an analogue act, and they could prosecute you for distribution of controlled substances if the substance could be classified along with the stipulations of that class. But not for anabolics. My attorney put together a very lengthy and good argument that I could not be prosecuted on this. The prosecutor came back and said, yeah, well, it makes sense, but you know he’s going to play anyway, because we have the United States government — the power of the United States government will make him pay. This was so high-profile my attorney said, you don’t say yes, plead whatever you can get. That’s what happened. I didn’t get a very serious sentence — prison is prison, but it wasn’t for very long.
So there was essentially a loophole — it didn’t apply to Schedule III, not at that felony level.
If I committed a crime, it would have been an esoteric misdemeanour, FDA — distribution of an unapproved new drug. They would have to prove that I intended it for drug-like purposes, which they could say, OK, well, you intended it to build muscle for athletes. What would be the ultimate sentence? I’d get probation. That’s not going to work for them. The only way for this to work was to find a felony and to force me to plead.
So they were arguing that you stayed within the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
That’s not a legally kosher argument. The argument was: we don’t care if he really broke the law, but he’s going to plead to breaking the law as we want, because we have infinite resources and he has nothing. That happens from time to time. Even if you’re right, you need so much money to fight being right. I wouldn’t have been able to afford to present a case.
And that was because of the media scrutiny on BALCO.
They could have asked for any amount of money they needed to make sure that I paid, and they would have pretty much got it.
You weren’t in the Netflix documentary directly. But the scandal — in terms of dissemination of undetectable drugs between 1999 and 2005 — you were right in the middle of it.
I was right in the middle of it, because I decided to give this stuff to athletes in other countries. In fact, one of the most famous athletes that Victor worked with got her Sydney gold medal stripped, and the person it was awarded to was a female track athlete from another country in Europe — and she was also on the nandrolone, and she still has that gold. You can get an idea that it was much more pervasive than BALCO. I worked with a lot of people, in all kinds of areas. It just wasn’t publicised. I never felt I should run out and tattletale on everyone.
Prohormones, Andro, and the chemist who built a category Congress would close
You’ve also been involved in all sorts of other things — prohormones, DMAA, which is a stimulant. Ursolic acid is one I associate you with too.
Ursolic acid is something I tried to develop derivatives of. It’s not something I discovered. It was widely known as a component in plants, studied by a University of Wisconsin researcher to show that the effects on gene expression suggested it would have a substantial effect upon the dynamics of muscle growth, muscle atrophy. That’s why I looked into it — in its parent form, it’s just not bioavailable. I was trying to make it increase its solubility to increase its bioavailability. I did some work on that, but that’s in the past.
You have an amazing track record of developing these compounds. If you were advising a young chemist — a young Patrick Arnold — what would you say? You clearly have this amazing intellect, but perhaps you haven’t had the rewards one might have expected.
I do get asked this fairly often, a lot of times by people initiating their education in chemistry. I don’t necessarily know what to tell them. If you want to do what I did specifically, you’re going to have to study organic chemistry at the graduate level, synthesis most likely. You also have to understand or identify novel applications for any chemical compound of interest. Then you need to mould the two together — find an application or imagine a compound that could do such and such, and set about synthesising it.
That’s what I started to do. I came up with these prohormone things, which are basically steroid compounds that convert to testosterone in the body. These were known compounds, but I developed a synthesis, and I identified — I also knew the legal situation regarding dietary supplements, and that such things could, at least at the time, be sold openly without any legal ramification.
People will have heard of things like 1-AD.
Andro was the first — stuff found in Mark McGwire‘s locker. Andro. Then there were second- and third-generation ones as well.
They’re now no longer allowed to be sold in the US, correct?
They were banned a while ago.
Exogenous ketones, BHB salts, and the DARPA research that almost made him
Our mutual connection Dom D’Agostino — you’ve done some work with him on ketones, which have applications for all sorts of things.
Dominic D’Agostino came to me around 2011, said he needed a compound synthesised — something called a ketone ester. That was an exogenous ketone. You could take it orally, and your body would metabolise it into acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyric acid, which are the two endogenous ketones.
In case people don’t know what ketones are — they’re alternative energy substrates that are formed in your body when it fully metabolises fat. They have a lot of health benefits — protection against cancer; they’re very effective substrates for energy in the brain and can help prevent seizures; they increase mitochondrial function. There’s a whole bunch of other things, and possible performance benefits as well.
I developed that substance for Dom. He used it in some studies, got very good results, and his funding went way up. Then I said, Dom, I’m interested if you could help me test out some alternatives that could be sold as nutritional supplements. Those were the BHB salts. BHB salts were available as a research chemical, but I developed a process to make them inexpensively. I wanted IP protection. Dom and I designed a study. Dom performed it. We took a combination of medium-chain triglycerides with BHB to show that there was an effect that wasn’t necessarily predictable. We were able to get a patent on that combination.
The BHB salts ended up becoming widely popular. Other companies, and MLMs in particular, started to sell them. We manufactured for them first, and then they went to China. The whole market quickly got so out of hand that I wasn’t able to fully benefit. That happens sometimes. 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.
They have applications in military settings, right? I spoke to Dom about that.
Dominic initially came to me for the ketone ester because organisations like the Office of Naval Research, or DARPA — they wanted something to help Navy SEAL divers that use these things called rebreathers, so they can remain stealth. They needed something to prevent the high oxygen levels from causing seizures, because they’re breathing oxygen under very high pressure.
They knew that ketones are anti-seizure, because children with epilepsy take the ketogenic diet, and it’s very effective. Dominic’s theory was that this ketone ester would increase the latency to seizures. This was demonstrated in rats — he gave them the ketone ester, and the rats that received it lasted like three times longer than the control rats in that pressurised oxygen chamber. So that was considered a proof of concept for use in Navy SEALs. Don’t ask me if the Navy SEALs are taking the ketone ester — I wouldn’t know.
Are you still involved in the ketone research?
No, I’m not. I worked on perfecting the synthesis of the ester — I was able to greatly simplify it and reduce the cost. I was selling the ester a little bit, mostly to research institutions, but that came and went. The company that was doing that is gone now.
NAD, NMN, epicatechin, and the longevity tech Patrick Arnold was personally taking
Continuing with this theme of emerging tech — I saw you talk about NAD boosters. People will think of NMN and NR. I’d love your thoughts on those, particularly as they relate to longevity.
My thoughts on them only reflect what’s already in the published literature. I got my interest in NAD and NAD precursors primarily from a personal standpoint, because I want to be healthy and live longer. I do take NMN — I take a gram every morning.
NAD has such diverse functions in the body. Anything that’s an energy-dependent process almost always needs the coenzyme NAD. Its effects on enhancing mitochondrial function — because all those reactions in the mitochondria to generate ATP require NAD to fuel them, throughout the citric acid cycle. It also fuels epigenetic processes, specifically these proteins called sirtuins, that are essential to repair damaged DNA.
As we grow older, our DNA — it’s very sensitive stuff, chemically speaking. It’s constantly being damaged by environmental toxins or just biochemical wastes. If these sirtuins and the DNA repair system aren’t working well, you’re going to end up getting more and more deleterious mutations, and that could spark cancer, cellular death, apoptosis. So that’s a big target of NAD.
I’m just scratching the surface. The NAD demand in postpartum women is so high, because manufacturing breast milk is a very energy-dependent process. In the postpartum period, there’s a great elevation of NAD metabolites and precursors in the blood that are released from the liver to enhance production of NAD in the mammary tissue. That’s another of countless processes where NAD levels are essential.
And NAD declines with age.
It declines with age, as is a sharp increase in NADases — NAD-destructive enzymes. One in particular is called CD38. So that goes up, and your NAD levels drop. There are two approaches to raising NAD: supplementation with precursors, and inhibiting the CD38 enzyme, which some compounds are known to do.
Do you do that as well?
There are a couple of flavonoids — flavones — that do that, and I’ve experimented with them. However, their bioavailability is so poor that I’m not sure I’m absorbing them. I’ve experimented with different ways of formulating them to increase the solubility. But I have no way to really know if that’s working. I’m experimenting with ways that should make a marked effect on increasing their solubility. At that point, I may start to experiment with them more myself.
Is that things like apigenin?
Apigenin, chrysin, as well.
Are there any other emerging things in the longevity space that show promise?
There’s a polyphenol from cocoa — also found in green tea. It’s called epicatechin. It has benefits in enhancing mitochondrial biogenesis and mitochondrial function. It has great benefits upon vascular health, increasing blood flow — flow-mediated dilation, it’s called. You need good blood flow to get nutrients to your tissues.
But the most exciting aspect is that it decreases the amount of a substance called myostatin, which is produced in the muscle and is a negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth. The more myostatin you have, the less potential of increasing muscle mass. If you take myostatin away, the processes of muscle growth will be enhanced. It’s been demonstrated to do that even more than once in humans.
There’s a very striking image — the myostatin-knockout bull, the Belgian Blue. So it inhibits that to a meaningful degree.
Two to three-fold reduction in humans. They also demonstrated increased muscle mass and growth in humans, considered correlative with the decrease in myostatin.
You also recently talked about a muscle-sparing drug that could work with GLP-1 agonists.
These GLP-1 agonists are extremely effective at causing weight loss, primarily through appetite suppression. The problem is, maybe people lose 20% of their body weight — for a 200-pound person, that’s 40 pounds. But half of that weight loss is in lean body mass, primarily muscle tissue, which is not healthy. It leads to diminishing effects of the weight loss, because as your body loses lean mass, your basal metabolism drops. Lean body mass is essential for survival. If you get sick, your lean mass stores will determine, in large part, whether you survive.
A company called BioAge developed a compound called azelaprag, which mimicked an endogenous exerkine — signalling molecules released by muscle during exercise. Azelaprag is a non-peptide analogue, orally active. They found it’s quite effective at preventing muscle breakdown. They combined it with tirzepatide — Mounjaro — and the people who used the combination didn’t lose the lean muscle mass. In fact, their overall weight loss was increased. They’re trying to get FDA approval for this combination.
People should also be aware that when you take these GLP-1 agonists for weight loss, half of that weight is coming out as lean body mass. You have to be aware of that.
Something I’ve always wanted to ask you about, especially with your background, is gene editing — gene doping. Do you think that sort of thing is already happening in sport?
It certainly could be used in sport. It would be almost impossible to detect. At one time I was researching gene doping regarding a molecule called IGF-1 — muscle-derived or muscle-specific IGF-1. The technology involved using a vector — plasmids, or sometimes an adenovirus, which is specific for muscle — and putting that gene within the adenovirus. The virus then attacks the muscle, inserts the IGF-1-producing gene in the DNA of your muscle, and your muscle starts pumping out IGF-1 and your muscles get bigger. That was shown to increase muscle size in rats at least.
If this was being used, it would have to be used by some country or group that was highly sophisticated. My first thought is China. China doesn’t seem to have the same ethical reservations — I’m not saying the United States wouldn’t, on a state-sponsored level. Russia could, though I don’t think Russia’s got other concerns right now.
There was that famous case of editing two babies in China for resistance to HIV.
There are a lot of genes that are known to do things that could have a wide variety of implications.
It might be happening, and we wouldn’t necessarily be able to detect it with traditional methods.
If no one sees it, they wouldn’t suspect it. Let me take that back — if you start seeing Chinese athletes with physiques that are incongruent with the typical Chinese physique, you’re going to be like, OK, this is not natural selection, because your gene pool just would not allow for this. Or if you see records being broken at a rate that’s indescribable, then you know some kind of doping is going on. As for the technology being obvious — that would take some stroke of luck, or someone involved being a whistleblower.
Looking back: Patrick Arnold on regret, Victor Conte, and the body you rent
What are you most excited about working on at the moment?
Honestly, I’m not really actively doing a whole lot right now. I’m trying to get back into doing some stuff. Everything in a regulatory basis regarding the nutritional supplement industry has become so restrictive that it doesn’t allow for me to be innovative.
I cannot introduce a novel compound, no matter if it’s ubiquitous in nature, harmless. 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 an NDI — new dietary ingredient approval process — which means hundreds of thousands of dollars for safety studies, efficacy studies. You could still be turned down. That’s not feasible.
The only thing I could do in the realm of developing new compounds to be sold as nutritional supplements would be to take existing compounds that are already considered nutritional supplement products and then add things to them to enhance their bioavailability, or add other synergistic compounds.
Is there anything you have your eye on there?
I’m developing something with various ingredients for anti-ageing-type, health-promoting-type usage. I already have a prototype formula. I’m working with my old partner to see if I can move that along and get it on the market.
There must be a lot of labs that contact you, that want to work with you. You’re shaking your 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.
Looking back now — BALCO was 20-odd years ago. How do you reflect on it?
Honestly, the process of me being a convicted felon, an ex-con, and the subsequent inappropriate attention by law enforcement — that led to the shutdown of the large business I had in 2009. It led to default against certain loans. It pretty much caused great damage in my life. On the other hand, I got a lot of notoriety that I don’t feel as though I’ve ever sufficiently exploited. I’m not sure how long that window of opportunity is going to continue.
If you were to weigh the pros and cons, I wish it never happened. 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. But I chose that path. It just didn’t go as well as I would have liked it to have.
It seems like outside that community of anti-doping or doping, the opportunities haven’t presented themselves as one might think.
People have heard of me — but it hasn’t resulted in any opportunities, really. If there were opportunities for me, they would have been in the past, because of the regulatory situation. There’s no room for a chemist to identify, develop, synthesise — or develop a synthesis for manufacturing — these new compounds. That’s where I shined. The need for that is no longer there. So I’m just another person that could do good formulation work. I can figure out how to make things more soluble or more bioavailable. But that’s something anyone could do. You don’t need a background in chemistry like I do for that.
It seems like you’re still dealing with the fallout of something from 20 years ago, in some ways.
I definitely dealt with fallout from it in 2009, and that kind of set the stage for closing a lot of doors. I don’t want to place blame on anyone else. But I do feel sort of bad blood with Victor Conte, because he really played fast and loose with this whole thing. He ran around and told everyone what was going on. He’d go to these trade shows, and I’d hear him talking to people about what he’s doing, and I’m like, what the hell are you doing?
We’d have email communications, and he would email me about, “Hey, could you send some of that stuff, the Clear, here?” And I’d like — “Victor, don’t you think it’s not a good idea to be emailing these things?” He said, “Well, just delete it.” Or, “Have a deletion party.” I’m like, “Victor, it doesn’t work that way. I don’t think you understand computer forensics.” He said, “Well, I don’t really care.” I’m like, “Well, you don’t care because it’s you. You probably want to get caught. But I don’t want to get caught, dude. I have a potential career as a chemist.”
He was very irresponsible with his interactions with Trevor Graham and his team. That led to that syringe being sent in. I paid a big price for this. He could afford to spend that little time in prison and be whatever the hell he claims to be right now, but I couldn’t.
It’s surprising he seems to have come out more unscathed.
He still has the same company. I think he still has a lot of professional athletes that he works with. They probably still think he has some magic tricks up his sleeve, but I don’t think he does.
He created ZMA, didn’t he.
Yeah, zinc magnesium supplement. It’s a bioavailable form of zinc and magnesium. So is magnesium glycinate, which you can get at your pharmacy. It’s all in the marketing.
I worked in the fitness industry for years, and I’ve seen people go on and off steroids. Sometimes coming off is very difficult. I’ve seen big guys lose their sense of self — become more reliant on this image of themselves as a big muscular guy — and then come off and really struggle.
You have to be psychologically prepared, and you have to be realistic about what’s going to happen. A lot of bodybuilders that were very large at one time — some discontinue not only their drug use, but their exercise. A lot of times they can’t continue to exercise like they used to, because of injuries. They don’t eat the same way. Their physique can change quite dramatically. They become smaller people. A lot of them still stay in very good shape and look in better shape than your average person of their age.
Some people, very unfortunate things happen — like Ronnie Coleman used to be Mr Olympia. He trained really heavy, and he totally screwed his back up. He can’t walk. But he seems to keep a very good attitude and is aggressively approaching his treatment with a very positive attitude, and that’s commendable.
If you’re taking that amount of drugs, if you’re training and eating the way a heavyweight pro bodybuilder is, you’re going to get so huge that you’re inevitably going to have to lose that mass. So if your self-esteem and identity is tied too much to your physique and being powerful-looking, you’re going to have a very tough time. I think a lot of people these days realise — OK, this physique I have right now is not me. Would have never been me if it weren’t for all these things I did. I have to get ready to go back to the me that maybe would have been me if I never done any of this stuff and be OK with it.
