Anti-Gravity: Freaks and Tweaks; June 2012; Scientific American Magazine; by Steve Mirsky; 1 Page(s)

The London Olympic Games and the Tour de France are on the horizon in Europe. Here in North America, the baseball season is under way, with football soon to follow. All of which means that around the world, in gleaming state-of-the-art facilities and dingy state-of-the-meth-lab basements, chemists are hard at work making molecules for athletes to swallow, snort, apply and inject into one another’s butts.

Almost all sports fans decry the use of performance-enhancing drugs. It’s cheating. It gives the user attributes he or she did not rightfully earn. It just feels wrong to most fans. It feels wrong to me. But I have a question that almost inevitably leads to heated arguments—which leads me to suspect that we’re dealing with deep emotional issues as much as intellectual analysis.