"A License to Cheat"

A recent Swedish study has concluded that ten percent of Caucasian men and a full two-thirds of Asian men have a genetic anomaly which prevents their bodies from breaking down testosterone into a form which dissolves in urine. Upshot: they can take and receive the benefits of testosterone without it being detected.

Predictably, the anti-doping authorities are shocked, nervous, flummoxed, and discombobulated:

“It’s disturbing,” said Dr. Don Catlin, the chief executive of Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit group in Los Angeles. “Basically, you have a license to cheat.”

Of course, rather than just accept that, at some point, people's bodies are always going to react differently to different stimuli, the anti-doping crowd would prefer to get more up in athletes' business:

Dr. Schulze and her colleagues suggest that athletes be tested to see if they have the testosterone-metabolizing gene. Others said the testing of athletes for this and other genes may be coming soon.

“The specter of doing this is out there,” says Dr. Alvin Matsumoto, a testosterone expert at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System.

Who knows where this is going to lead, but given how it usually ends up, I suppose we can soon expect to see Selig and Fehr before some Congressional committee explaining what they're gonna do to protect the children from those genetic freaks ruining the grand old game of baseball.