Harvey Shapiro, M.D., the former Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of California San Diego, has penned a medical-thriller about anabolic steroids, performance-enhancing drugs and gene doping entitled “Morphed: Winning at Any Cost Even if it Means Altering Your DNA”. Shapiro was inspired to write the novel after he served as a Doping Control Officer at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. During his time collecting urine samples from Olympic athletes, he spent considerable time thinking about all the means and methods by which athletes use steroids and PEDs while going undetected by anti-doping personnel.
“I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started thinking about how people would really cheat in sports if they wanted to,” Shapiro said during an interview with The Park Record. “I went through all kinds of different scenarios. I ran through ideas of corrupt DCOs to big corporations who would bribe people to turn their heads to doping.”
The novel is a cat-and-mouse game in which Dr. Speak Singleton, the protagonist, is a doping control officer at the 2012 London Olympic Games. The antagonists are a rogue pharmacologist named Simon Whitford and a Tour de France champion named Luke Garver.
Whitford and Garver go beyond steroids and utilized new gene doping techniques to enhance athletic performance. Dr. Singleton knows that the professional cyclist is using steroids or some other prohibited substance or technique. He is determined to bust Garver as a cheat.
Dr. Singleton is more motivated than the traditional steroid hunter. He caught his teenage son with a bag full of AndroGel. AndroGel contains an anabolic steroid known as testosterone in a transdermal delivery system. His son dies as a result of the bodybuilding steroids. Dr. Singleton seeks vengeance as he hunts down the dominant Lance Armstrong-like cyclist that everyone suspects is using drugs.
While the book may sound like a predictable anti-steroid story, Shapiro admits that his view of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs changed dramatically during the ten years he had worked on the book.
“My own morphing went from ‘I’m totally against doping and that’s why I’m doing this job,’ to ‘I’m a doctor, and we like to add years to life,'” he told the The Park Record. “And finally it went on a bit further to the point that ‘As doctors, we add quality to those years.’
Shapiro recognized that everyone dopes. Everyone is trying to enhance their performance using drugs such as Viagra, human growth hormone and even anabolic steroids such as testosterone as hormone replacement therapy.
Shapiro promises that the book is not just about doping and cycling but and doping and the “human race”.
Source:
Iwasaki, S. (February 7, 2012). New novel documents author’s ‘Morphed’ perception of sport doping. Retrieved from http://www.parkrecord.com/ci_19913688