After Stem Cell Treatment, Pitcher Regains Form

Article 1

Doctors took fat and bone marrow stem cells from Bartolo Colon and injected them in his elbow and shoulder. The pitcher has rebounded this year and is an early-season success with the Yankees.

A year ago, Bartolo Colon, once one of Major League Baseball's more durable starting pitchers, looked close to the end of the line: He had struggled with injuries after 2005, and elbow surgery had kept him out of baseball for the entire 2010 season.

The New York Yankees signed Colon in January after he pitched during the off-season in the Dominican Republic. His fastball -- often registering at 93 miles, or 150 kilometers, per hour or better -- appeared to be back. Colon, 37, has gone 2-0, with an earned run average of 3.81, since being inserted into the club's starting rotation and has been one of the surprises of the season so far.

A doctor in Florida would like to take some of the credit. Joseph Purita, an orthopedic surgeon who runs a regenerative medicine clinic in Boca Raton, said he and a team of Dominican doctors that he led had treated Colon in April 2010. Purita said he had employed what he regards as one of his more pioneering techniques: He used fat and bone marrow stem cells from Colon, injecting them back into the pitcher's elbow and shoulder to help repair ligament damage and a torn rotator cuff.

Purita said he had flown to the Dominican Republic and performed the procedures for free, doing it at the behest of a medical technology company based in Massachusetts that he has done business with for several years. Purita, who has used human growth hormone in such treatments, said in an interview that he had not done so in Colon's case. The use of human growth hormone is banned by baseball.

"This is not hocus-pocus," Purita said in an interview. "This is the future of sports medicine, in particular. Here it is that I got a guy back playing baseball and throwing pitches at 95 miles an hour."

Purita said that he had treated at least two dozen professional athletes, mostly baseball and football players, and that he had never given any of them H.G.H. "I just won't give it to these guys," Purita said. "I don't need the stigma and that kind of reputation."

For the past few years, baseball and other sports, while fighting to limit the use of performance-enhancing drugs, have been faced with a new and murky challenge: players getting sophisticated blood treatments, often from doctors whose practices involve the regular use of H.G.H.

Brian Cashman, the Yankees' general manager, said Wednesday that he had not known of Colon's medical treatment when the club signed him. Cashman said Colon's agent, aware that The New York Times was working on an article about the procedure and Purita's role, had notified him recently of the procedure. (The International Herald is the global edition of The New York Times.)

Cashman said he had, in response, informed Major League Baseball.

"The Yankees did notify us, and we are looking into it," said Pat Courtney, a spokesman for Major League Baseball.

In October, a U.S. grand jury in Buffalo, New York, indicted Anthony Galea, a Canadian doctor, on charges that he had provided many of the professional athletes he treated between July 2007 and September 2009 with human growth hormone and unapproved drugs. Galea was unlicensed to practice in the United States and yet had developed a reputation for helping athletes recover from injuries by using a blood-spinning technique known as platelet-rich plasma therapy.

The athletes he treated included the baseball players Alex Rodriguez, Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran; the golfer Tiger Woods; and the Olympic swimmer Dara Torres.

Those athletes have denied receiving H.G.H. Galea has acknowledged using H.G.H. himself but has denied providing any performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes.

Purita, 61, graduated from Georgetown University Medical School in Washington. His clinic in Florida offers the use of stem cells and platelet-rich plasma therapy, or P.R.P., as an alternative to surgery or in combination with it.

Purita uses P.R.P. injections with H.G.H. to treat many ligament, tendinitis and arthritic conditions, as well as muscle injuries and torn rotator cuffs. He said that P.R.P. and H.G.H. were both effective in supplementing stem cell therapy in certain individuals.

Purita said he had treated athletes from the Baltimore Ravens and the Miami Dolphins of the N.F.L. and the Chicago White Sox and the Texas Rangers of Major League Baseball. About 14 months ago, Purita said, Harvest Technologies, a Massachusetts company that has done work in the adult stem cell field, contacted him. Purita said the company had told him that a doctor in the Dominican Republic, Leonel Liriano, was looking to get Colon treated.

Colon, who has twice won 20 games in a season, had struggled with injuries after winning the 2005 American League Cy Young award. In the next four seasons, he made only 48 appearances with three teams. An elbow injury sidelined him for the final two months of the 2009 season, and he did not pitch at all in the majors in 2010.

Purita said he had agreed to go to the Dominican Republic to work with Liriano and treat Colon.

'It was not that it was illegal to do the procedure here in the United States," Purita said. "He was just living in the Dominican Republic. Everything was above board.

"Colon said he wanted to get back into baseball," Purita recalled. "He could not throw the ball without horrible pain, but he felt he still had something left in the can, so to speak."

Some experts in the field were cautious in assessing the efficacy of such stem cell treatment.

Freddie Fu, chairman of the department of orthopedic surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said, "Bone marrow is a good source of stem cells, but I don't think there is any definitive evidence to show that it will benefit a condition like this."

Fu added: "You need more of a scientific study. Just the use of this generally should not be done because it is not shown to be effective.

"We know how stem cells work in cancer and AIDS patients. But in sports, we just don't know. There is a lot of hype."

Purita said that once the procedure was done -- it lasted roughly 45 minutes, he said -- the results were evident.

"We had him start working out within the first month," Purita said. "Then I am hearing that he is starting to pitch, and then I hear that he is starting to tear them up in the Dominican league. But I said with a rotator cuff tear and a bad elbow, I don't know about him getting back into the majors."

Colon, whose English is limited, answered only, "I don't know, I don't know," when asked last week about his treatment in the Dominican Republic.

"I feel in my heart and my soul, his performance has been because of the treatment," Liriano said. "You see that his fastball is about 95 or 96 miles per hour. It is a miracle, no?" Article 2

Kovaleski, Serge F. "After Stem Cell Treatment, Pitcher Regains Form." International Herald Tribune. 13 May 2011: 14. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 14 Feb 2013. ELECTRIC RUNNING SHOES

MATERIAL WORLD HARNESS YOUR ENERGY By S.F. Engineers have been converting mechanical stress into electricity using piezoelectric devices for more than a hundred years, but the goal of powering an iPod by pounding the pavement has remained elusive. Current piezoelectric materials are difficult to manufacture and typically contain toxic metals, such as nickel and lead. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have solved both problems by using a genetically engineered virus that self- assembles into a film. When pressure is applied, helical proteins on the viruses' shells twist and turn, generating a charge. Tapping a postage-stamp-size swatch produces 400 millivolts of electricity, or enough to briefly power an LCD screen. Within 5 to 10 years, says bioengineer Seung-Wuk Lee, the film could be used to harness power from building vibrations, heartbeats, and other types of movement, too. S., F. "Electric Running Shoes." Popular Science 281.5 (2012): 46. Health Source - Consumer Edition. Web. 26 Feb. 2013. Article 3

Copyright: 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. All rights reserved. The Age of Genetically Optimized Sports By Dov Greenbaum

The eyes of the world will be on Oscar Pistorius when he competes at the London Olympics. Mr. Pistorius, a double amputee who runs with the aid of carbon-fiber artificial legs, will contest the 400-meter sprint and the 4 x 400-meter relay against non-disabled athletes.

Mr. Pistorius, and others like him, present a real dilemma for sports competitions: When does an artificial enhancement become an unfair advantage?

Lasik eye surgery can give an athlete better than average vision. Elbow joints can be reconstructed with stronger ligaments. Swimsuits may reduce friction in water. Oxygen tents can boost cardiovascular capacity. While sports organizations typically draw the line at taking performance-enhancing drugs, such as steroids, these other apparent enhancements are permitted by most major sports associations.

Yet retired American sprinter Michael Johnson spoke for many when he claimed that "because we don't know for sure whether [Mr. Pistorius] gets an advantage from the prosthetics that he wears it is unfair to the able-bodied competitors."

Of course top athletes are often defined by their success in a genetic lottery that granted them natural yet "unfair" advantages over their peers.

Even more radical changes are on the way. Future developments in genetics, particularly as a result of the growing personal genomics industry, will allow individuals to sequence and partially decipher their own genomes. This will draw public awareness to genetics in athletics, creating a paradigm shift in our appreciation of the quality of competition in sports. Genomics may eventually accentuate the inequality among athletes, allowing those with genomic knowledge to better focus their abilities and strengths.

Some companies that sequence human genomes already claim to be able to identify genetic sports-related health risks and the genes that maximize individual athletic potential. In fact, sports may be one of the first really successful applications of personal genomics, as it presents some potentially simple genetic correlations, given easily identifiable physical traits in successful athletes. Thanks to a greater popular appreciation of the genetics behind athleticism coupled with advances in genetic manipulation, we may soon see athletes-by-design, either from conception or a childhood tailored to sports for which the budding athlete is already genetically optimized. Will society discriminate against the athlete whose parents selected a child with superhuman resting and maximum heart rates, a disproportionate arm span or double-jointed ankles? After all, these super-competitive traits were naturally endowed to Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps.

The genomics industry will introduce transparency into an otherwise opaque system, eventually allowing athletes, fans and spectators alike to pull back the curtain and look under the genetic hood. By taking away much of the mystery of athletic talent through correlating athleticism with observable genetic variations, and bringing that technology to the masses, science will eventually prove to the public just how uneven the playing field already is.

Genome analyses may be able to predict athletic prowess and the likelihood of sport-related illnesses and injuries. But such knowledge will likely come at the expense of privacy.

Coaches and fans today demand to know players' height, weight and other pertinent statistics. Tomorrow, they might insist on knowing athletes' genomic sequences to determine how they have leveraged their genetic gifts.

Analyzing genomes raises numerous non-trivial ethical challenges, with an inevitable shift to viewing athletic accomplishment through the prism of genetics. Whereas traditionally one's medical records are thought to be private information, we may soon see organizations divulging their athletes' genome sequences in the interest of transparency -- just as athletes' drug-testing results eventually become public knowledge and fodder.

Mr. Pistorius is thus at an athletic and scientific vanguard. He may catalyze a whole new way of looking at sports when he runs, and perhaps finds success, among his able-bodied peers. Mr. Greenbaum, an intellectual property attorney and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, is a non-resident fellow at Stanford University's Center for Law and the Biosciences. Mr. Gerstein is a professor of biomedical informatics at Yale University.

Greenbaum, Dov. "The Age of Genetically Optimized Sports." Wall Street Journal. 24 Jul 2012: p. A.13. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 14 Feb 2013. Article 4

In 1970, Gene Ferguson of the San Diego Chargers had a unique distinction: He was the only 300-pounder in the NFL. In the 1980s, William "The Refrigerator" Perry, at 340 pounds, was still a rarity. This weekend, in the NFL's final regular season games, Perry-size linemen will be all over the field. More than 350 players tip the scales at 300 pounds or more.

Watch the bowl games, and you'll see that college players have grown, too, with scores of them packing on 30 pounds--and some as much as 80 pounds--in a single year, according to a recent Associated Press investigation.

It's possible that all these behemoths are just eating their Wheaties. It's also possible some are getting help from illegal human growth hormone (HGH).

The only way to find out for sure is to test for it. The NFL appeared on the brink of doing just that in August 2011, when the league and the players' union agreed to a modest testing program in their new contract.

Now, nearly 18 months later, that plan looks more like a tease. The NFL Players Association has thrown up obstacles, insisting that the current test--already used on thousands of Olympians-- might be unreliable. The union also wants a "population study" to determine whether size would affect test outcomes.

If this stall sounds familiar, it's because it is. In the 1990s, Major League Baseball and its players' union ignored the obvious signs that some of its biggest stars were using steroids, then the drug of choice for cheaters. As players aged, they grew not only bigger but also stronger, a suspicious combination. Barry Bonds' head size even enlarged.

Today, the evidence in football seems just as obvious to those willing to look. Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Anthony Gonzalez said he suspects HGH use: "I see guys I saw in college; now they're in the NFL, and they look totally different," he told The Indianapolis Star last year.

Stalling is particularly unseemly for the union, whose greatest concern ought to be protecting the safety of its members. Nor should any player feel he has to cheat to compete. Whenever a player uses HGH, he is jeopardizing his own health and, indirectly, the health of others. Beyond the hype that HGH increases muscle mass, speeds the healing of injuries and boosts the effect of steroids, there are dangerous side effects: diabetes, high blood pressure and abnormal bone growth, to mention a few. Carrying around 300-plus pounds isn't good, either.

Supersized players make for more vicious collisions, increasing the risk of long-term injuries, including concussions.

The game's integrity is at stake, too, as baseball learned the hard way. When its steroid era finally ended, baseball was left with tarnished stars and once-hallowed records that had been broken by a bunch of cheaters. The taint is alive today, as steroid-era stars become eligible for baseball's Hall of Fame.

There's also this: Behavior by the pros trickles down to the college players, and to younger boys seeking to emulate their idols. Boys with NFL ambitions couldn't miss the fact that NFL and big- time college linemen are giants. It's hard to avoid suspicions that steroids or harder-to-detect HGH helped them get that way.

The NFL has been testing for steroids and other illegal drugs for years, but HGH, a newer drug that is illegal in the U.S. without a prescription, presents a special challenge.

HGH detection requires a blood test, more invasive than the urine tests used to detect other drugs. Setting the threshold that triggers a positive finding isn't simple, giving the union's qualms some legitimacy. But its arguments have become less convincing as time goes by.

Nearly 13,000 athletes have been tested around the world. Eleven have failed. Eight have acknowledged the results are accurate. With just three athletes contesting the results, the risk of false positives appears low.

If union leaders had so many reservations 18 months ago, they shouldn't have agreed "in principle" to the tests. But they did. Now it's time to live up to their word.

"How Did Today's Supersized Football Players Get So Big?." USA TODAY. 28 Dec 2012: A.12. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 14 Feb 2013.