I thought the DNA test example in the article, as an example of a false positive, was quite flabby.

I will use the same type of argument here.

The DNA test example in the Velonews article is pretty bad and hardly seems applicable to the drug tests that I read about during the course of the Landis case. Hence, I will assume the dope testing article in Nature is equally lame, and won’t waste any more time reading it.

The entire paper is based on information provided by the Landis defense team. Viewing antidoping science through such information is very problematic.

If they had a good test yes announce it. Might have deterred some people from taking it. Might have allowed sneaky use also, but I don’t see it as a net loss. Keeping it secrets helps the first wave. Now it is announced and people can try to work around it. So we are now in the same situation.

Thinking about what you said, I think that it illustrates a problem with how many people (actually probably not Gavia from your previous posts) see drug testing. It is like, if we wipe out the current users and suppliers we have fixed the problem. No until rules are changed (likely never) to allow reasonably safe documented use of PED’s we will ALWAYS have a drug problem – always. Every day there may be a new athlete and doctor combo. So get all the testing in the open. Get all the processes which continuously monitor out in the open, and you might get to a somewhat stable place where the big hitter drugs and doping doesn’t skew things much. That is one big reason I like the passport idea – it is a continuous process running forever, not a raid type thing which doesn’t really change things over time.

That is not exactly true. At some issue is whether or not the people reviewing actually do know how to read “the stuff.” My own experience in criminal forensics is that there are far, far more problems than the institutional experts want to admit, that there’s a party line and it’s what gets put forward and it is very, very difficult to challenge because it’s been institutionally accepted. There is very much an “old boys” club that controls the bulk of dialog. I suspect strongly from what I’ve read that the anti-doping industry is very similar. [This is NOT a suggestion that most cases are in fact frameups or bogus, but rather that it can happen and the absolute certainty is dogma rather anything that has been investigated or confirmed through experiment.]

The popular notion is that the results are unambiguous, that positive means positive means user. The original test that raised the red flag, the T/E ratio has been demonstrated to be largely worthless as it was applied. It takes a statistical interpretation more complex than “it’s above 4” [with 4 being an entirely arbitrary number]. This has been published recently from research done by the Swiss anti-doping agency using exactly the statistical methodologies that Berry indicates are necessary. The isotopic carbon indicative of an exogenous testosterone probably will indicate exogenous testosterone, but whether or not it’s possible to get the same readings from some other entirely innocent cause. Since it’s been traditional that only individuals with the skewed (but potentially meaningless) T/E ratios have been subjected to testing for isotopic traces of exogenous testosterone, the data have been terribly, terribly distorted.