Don Catlin, who headed an elite anti-doping laboratory, dies at 85

Dr. Don Catlin, who built the first U.S. anti-doping laboratory, and whose research unlocked the chemistry behind countless previously undetectable performance-enhancing drugs and ensnared athletes who cheated by using steroids and other banned substances, died Jan. 16 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.

His son Oliver said the cause was a stroke. He also said his father had been diagnosed with dementia.

Dr. Dubbed the father of drug testing in sports, Catlin was the director of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, which he founded two years before the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and led until 2007.

Over time, his laboratory tested as many as 45,000 urine samples per year, looking for traces of banned substances in U.S. Olympians; professional football players; collegiate and minor league baseball players; and competitors at one FIFA World Cup.

“He was a great legend,” Travis T. Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, said in an interview. “His charm and stature in gatherings of scientists and non-scientists allowed him to explain complicated science to sportsmen and then put on his lab coat and work on carbon isotope ratio analysis.”

The Quarter Century of Dr. Catlin's lab coincided with a period of drug scandals in the sporting world, including one involving Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who was stripped of his gold medal in the 100 meters at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. after testing positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol.

Such controversies continued into the 2000s, with revelations that the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, or Balco, near San Francisco, distributed steroids and illegal supplements to athletes including baseball superstar Barry Bonds and track and field star Marion Jones. Also at that time, cyclist Lance Armstrong returned from cancer to win a record seven consecutive Tours de France using a regime of banned substances. Ultimately, he was stripped of those titles.

How diligent Dr. As Catlin and the technicians in his laboratory worked to track down cheaters and discover new doping methods, he realized he faced a Sisyphean task.

“I'm not saying it's doomed to failure, but we're always trying to catch up,” he said New Scientist magazine in 2007. “I don't think all the mass spectrometers and all the chemists in the world can really deal with this. It will be very expensive to develop tools to detect new drugs.”

Donald Hardt Catlin was born on June 4, 1938 in New Haven, Conn. His father, Kenneth, was an insurance executive. His mother, Hilda (Hardt) Catlin, managed the home.

After graduating from Yale University in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in statistics and psychology, he was persuaded to study medicine by a family friend who was a surgeon. Five years later, he earned an MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

From 1965 to 1968, he interned and served a residency at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine and another at the University of Vermont Department of Medicine before returning to UCLA as chief resident.

While in the United States Army from 1969 to 1972, Dr. Catlin in internal medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and in his final year ran a treatment center for soldiers who had become addicted to heroin while fighting in the Vietnam War. . He told USA Today in 2007 that he had battled with Pentagon generals over his belief that the addicts should receive medical treatment and not be jailed for taking drugs.

“But they locked them up anyway,” he said.

After his discharge, he joined the faculty at UCLA as an assistant professor of pharmacology and medicine. A specialist in pain management, he and other researchers published a study in 1977 among five patients that investigated whether a morphine-like substance in the human pituitary gland could relieve pain and withdrawal symptoms from narcotics.

In 1982, he became the first director of the Olympic Anti-Doping Laboratory, with financial support of at least $1.5 million from the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. During the 1984 Summer Games, at least eleven athletes tested positive for steroids there.

Dr. Catlin expanded the lab's drug testing to include research that advanced global efforts to clean up doping in sports.

In the late 1990s, he developed the carbon isotope ratio to determine whether an anabolic steroid was produced naturally in the body or came from a banned substance, such as a synthetic steroid. In 2002, he revealed for the first time in sports the use of a form of EPO, or erythropoietin, which increases endurance by stimulating the production of red blood cells. Three gold medalists in cross-country skiing tested positive for the substance and were stripped of their medals.

Also in 2002, Dr. Catlin first detected an anabolic designer steroid, norboletone, in an athlete's urine after it was introduced to athletes at Balco by chemist Patrick Arnold.

“That was the first evidence that designer drugs existed,” said Dr. Catlin in an interview at the time. “It said there were more to come.”

Then Dr. discovered Catlin in 2003 another designer steroid, tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, after a syringe taken anonymously to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency was brought to his laboratory.

It was a groundbreaking discovery as the active ingredient in 'the clear', a previously undetectable steroid that Balco provided to many athletes. Barry Bonds testified before a federal grand jury that he had been given the “clear” and a testosterone-based cream by his trainer, but he said he was told it was flaxseed oil and a pain-relieving balm.

Jeff Novitzky, an Internal Revenue Service agent who began investigating the spread of performance-enhancing drugs in 2002, turned to Dr. Catlin after rummaging through Balco's trash and collecting data posted online by Victor Conte Jr., the lab's founder and president.

“I cold-called him very early on, and he walked me through everything that year,” Mr. Novitzky said in an interview. “I had no idea what I found. During my trash collections I found discarded drug containers, email messages from athletes, invoices for epitestosterone, and he said the only reason to get epitestosterone is to beat a drug test. I could see the bells ringing in his head that something was going on.

Dr. Catlin testified in 2003 before the grand jury investigating Balco and Mr. Conte, who pleaded guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering. He was in prison for four months. Mr. Bonds was convicted of obstruction of justice, but the conviction was overturned.

Dr. Catlin later discovered a number of designer steroids, including methylandrostenol or madol, the active ingredient in a subsequent version of 'the clear' that was also found during a raid on the Balco lab.

After retiring from the UCLA laboratory he went went into business with his son Oliver providing services including customizing private drug testing programs for sports organizations, athletes and schools, and testing and certifying dietary supplements and nutritional products for prohibited substances and labeling claims. Dr. Catlin also continued related research and oversaw the testing of human growth hormone, or HGH, at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

In 2009, Dr. voted. Catlin agreed to implement a strict and transparent anti-doping plan for Mr Armstrong, who retired from cycling in 2005. But the plan was abandoned before Dr. Catlin received a complete blood and urine sample because the program was too complex and expensive, he told The New York Times at the time.

In addition to his son Oliver, Dr. Catlin is survived by a son, Bryce, and two grandchildren. His wife, Bernadette (DeGroote) Catlin, died in 1989.

Dr. Catlin said he felt an urgent need to keep the Olympics, which he called “something natural and beautiful,” drug-free.

He told USA Today in 2007: “I can't think of anything more exciting than the Olympic model, where 220 countries of the world participate and every four years they do their best to compete against the best from other countries and the best man or woman wins. That is beautiful. What's more fun? Only it's the meds, stupid.'