Category: Biology

Sciencebase reader Toar Winter emailed with a rather intriguing question.

Baseball star Rafael Palmeiro tested positive for anabolic steroids in August 2005 after telling the US Congress he had never taken such drugs before and was banned for ten days. He still insists he did not take steroids, or that if he did they were ingested through unprescribed supplements that contained stanozolol, the actual substance for which he tested positive.

Stanozolol is an old steroid and a test for its illegal use in sport has been used successfully for many years. It would actually make little sense for any sportsperson to cheat using this particular drug as it is detected so easily. This is especially true given the plethora of alternative, including human growth hormon (HGH) for which current testing methods are not quite so efficient.

So, back to Winter’s question. First, he points out that Palmeiro’s only advertising sponsor is Viagra, then asks whether or not it could be Viagra that produced a “false positive” for the steroid. After all, there is certainly some overlap between the effects and side effects of viagra and certain steroids. Winter, wants to know whether or not Pfizer in developing Viagra initially altered the structure of stanozolol slightly to produce a ‘different’ drug with similar or more directed effects.

As far as I know this is not the case. Pfizer was developing a drug for angina and high blood pressure in the late 1980s when it discovered that male volunteers in its clinical trials were seeing a rather outstanding side-effect of the drug. They’d actually based their leads on a known, but unmarketed, allergy drug Zaprinast, which inhibits the enzyme phosphodiesterase. The rest is history. This compound is not related to stanozolol as far as I know. If any readers can affirm otherwise, please leave a comment or email me.

Winter’s line of reasoning, however, is intriguing nonetheless. “Think about it,” he says, “not many athletes in today’s world are of the age where Viagra is needed, so drug testing probably wouldn’t detect many offenders.

It’s an intriguing idea, but I don’t think Winter’s theory stands up to close scrutiny. If it did, wouldn’t it be ironic that many of those same (elder) Congressmen pointing the finger at Palmeiro would have also shown positive in the same test?

Meanwhile, in other news, Pfizer has lost its battle to name the Chinese brand Viagra, “Wei Ge” (according to http://www.chinacourt.org/). The phrase is commonly used in China, where copycat generics out sell the real thing, but Guangzhou Welman, a Chinese ED drug maker already registered this name and the courts have said it should be allowed to retain the rights to it. I’m sure at least one regular reader of the Sciencebase blog will be able to tell us the origin of that name…

Bottled seaside air! It almost sounds like a scam from the Victorian era when the bracing “ozone” of fresh air at the British seaside was said to cure all kinds of ailments and led to a boom in seaside resorts and continues to ebb and flow.

But, it’s not a scam. Researchers at the University of East Anglia have been plucking bacteria from the North Norfolk coast at a little village called Stiffkey (pronounced Stoo-Kee) and fermenting them to reproduce the marshy smell of the seaside in the laboratory.

Andrew Johnston and his team isolated the bacterium from the mud at Stiffkey saltmarsh and have identified the single gene responsible for the emission of the strong-smelling gas, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).

“On bracing childhood visits to the seaside we were always told to “breathe in that ozone, it’s good for you’,” said Prof Johnston. “But we were misled, twice over,” he adds, “First, that distinctive smell is not ozone [a highly toxic allotrope of oxygen], it is dimethyl sulfide. And secondly, inhaling it is not necessarily good for you.”

DMS is a little known but important gas. Across the world’s oceans, seas and coasts, tens of millions of tonnes are released by microbes that live near plankton and marine plants, including seaweeds and some salt-marsh plants. The gas plays an important role in the formation of cloud cover over the oceans, with major effects on climate.

Intriguingly, DMS acts as a homing scent for seabirds, almost like the odour of Brussels sprouts at a festive dinner table – it helps birds sniff out food in the lonely oceans, even at astonishingly low concentrations. Understanding the role of microbes in producing this key chemical is important in understanding a whole range of ecosystems.

The discovery adds to the diverse list of Stiffkey’s claims to fame. The small coastal village is renowned for its ‘Stewkey Blue’ cockles and was also the home of Henry Williamson, author of “Tarka the Otter”. It’s also known for its infamous rector, Reverend Harold Davidson, who was defrocked in 1932 after allegedly “cavorting with” London prostitutes. The pronunciation of the village’s name itself is even controversial with the older locals preferring the archaic Stoo-Kee, while the incomers often prefer the posher sounding and phonetic Stiff-Key. (Incidentally, my photograph of beachhuts at the head of this article was taken along the coast at Wells-next-the-Sea.