Boost for drug cheats

More news this week that tests for the illegal blood booster EPO are proving futile. Professor Don Catlin of the Olympic Medical Commission said research had been put back two years by the corruption scandals and it's highly unlikely that a test will be introduced in time for Sydney.

They may well be wasting their time anyway. According to a report in this month's Scientific American, the future now lies with injections of genes that will increase muscle mass - without exercise - and are almost completely undetectable. Researchers have cloned the gene that leads to muscle growth and using a standard biological technique can insert the gene into muscle cells. Acting like a tiny Trojan horse, the engineered gene then induces the muscle to grow.

The results on lab mice speak for themselves. After two weeks the muscle mass in the mouse's leg had increased by 15 per cent - without exercise. Scary.