Going upstream in the scientific process, literally.
My latest post for Wired Playbook reports on a new idea that two UK researchers have proposed for keeping tabs on which Olympic athletes are using performance-enhancing drugs.
Rather than having the athletes pee in a cup or get blood drawn just before competition, the researchers believe that searching for drug metabolites in the wastewater that flows from the Olympic village might be more effective, especially if used in conjunction with current screening methods.
These studies indicate that fancy chemical analysis techniques can indeed detect drugs in wastewater, but claiming that some fraction of Olympic athletes uses PEDs, based on data showing traces of illegal substances in the sewer water? Well, that wouldn’t make Olympic officials blink. Unless researchers can hone in on who was using them, the idea simply won’t fly.
Katsoyiannis admits that while solid research supports their theoretical claim, the actual practice of monitoring wastewater in an Olympic Village to specifically target illicit drug use hasn’t been tested. But he plans to harness localization techniques developed during years of environmental research that could isolate the origin of certain organic pollutants that contaminate water supplies through rigorous sample collection and old-fashioned detective work.
I went “upstream” on this piece, and not just in the, er, wastewater vernacular sense. But upstream in that it’s reporting science at the beginning of the process, when the idea was just that, an idea. No data had been collected. No analysis completed.
Most science coverage waits until the end of the study to simply relay results. But in an effort to try new formats and techniques, I decided to cover the very early stages of discovery.
