Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield and on the call with me today is Chris Cooper who is a professor

of biochemistry at the University of Essex and the head of research in sports and exercise

science and he's written a book called Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat. The reason that I got Chris Cooper

on a call with us today is because there is so much interest generated around my interview with

age-grouper triathlete Kevin Moetz about drug cheating and the use of illegal performance

enhancing drugs in in this case Iron Man triathlon that I really wanted to get someone who was kind

of an expert in the chemistry of how all of this works and really the politics of it on the call

explore some of the stuff in more detail and and give you guys some good content and a better

understanding of how all this works. So Chris, thanks for coming on the call today.

Yeah great thanks Ben thanks for inviting me. So for you specifically what's your background?

I mean why did you write this book Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat? Well I'm a biochemist as you said

so I look at molecules and how they interact in the body. I'm also mostly working oxygen

so oxygen and biology partly looking at trying to solve clinical problems but also trying to see

how we could improve oxygen delivery to maybe improve sports performance. One of my other areas is

I work on making artificial blood so to replace blood transfusions and that's an ongoing

struggle or battle but it's a very interesting area hopefully we'll succeed someday but that is

banned that the use of those artificial blood transfused was banned in sport so I sort of got

involved interested in the idea that what would make something banned and I didn't think these

compounds would necessarily really improve sports performance so I was saying why is something

banned? What's the biochemist tree? At the same time I started to teach drugs in sport to my

undergraduate students in the in the university so I thought oh hey why don't I just go as a biochemist?

Moderately naive to the field is about four or five years ago and just see what is the science?

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