Larry Bowers, the chief science officer for the United States Anti-Doping Agency, gave a presentation on Oct. 4, 2014, at the organization’s Symposium on Anti-Doping Science.
Dr. Bowers stood before a small, international group of researchers at the Phoenix Marriott Tempe in the Arizona hills and spoke about a novel drug that was unfamiliar to most in the room: meldonium, which had been developed in Latvia in the 1970s as a heart medication. The concern was that elite athletes were abusing it to enhance their performance through its ability to energize the cell’s powerhouses, the mitochondria.