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The Atomic Level Athletic Frontier
| Article
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17311 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1990 |
1,633 Words |
| Author
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Richrd A. Goodman
Richard A. Goodman is a free-lance writer residing in Oakland.
He specializes in anthropology and in the conjunction of
science and athletics. |
Nuclear weapon weldings and the world's fastest swimmer have something remarkable in common. Their constituent chemical elements have been analyzed by an ICP atomic emission spectrometer. Innovative applications of a machine already 15 years old now promise new advances in human performance and health maintenance.
The ICP (inductively coupled plasma) spectrometer was commercially introduced in 1974 by the Applied Research Laboratories division of Bausch and Lomb in Southern California. Although one of the instruments was installed at the Cottage Hospital at Santa Barbara, California, in the mid 1970s to develop clinical applications, this initiative faltered - for management reasons, not scientific reasons - and until recently few biomedical uses of the ICP spectrometer had been developed.
In the meantime, the technology has been continuously improved and numerous useful industrial applications have been realized. For example, when analysis of the composition of shavings from the welded seam of an atomic weapon's casing reveals that it would be too weak, the defective casing can be rewelded or replaced. In one of the machine's first uses, Hughes Aircraft personnel ran jet engines, then periodically analyzed the resultant "wear oil." This helped maintenance crews determine when to change engine parts. Most large railroads now use the device in similar way, and most steel and aluminum factories use it for determining product composition, an essential step in quality control. Water companies also use the ICP spectrometer to check product purity. And police departments have even found it useful in the chemical analysis of evidence. The Environmental Protection Agency uses the ICP spectrometer to determine whether waste dump soil samples contain toxic chemicals and whether people living in surrounding areas have become contaminated.
Improving Athletic Performance
Except for this last application, ICP spectrometers have been used surprisingly little to analyze the chemical elements comprising the human body. This began to change in March 1984 when Victor Conte, president of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) in Burlingame, California, began applying ICP spectrometry to the analysis of chemical element levels in the blood, hair, and urine of elite athletes. Conte was looking for correlations between chemical element levels and performance. He began acquiring a 35-element data base even though only 25 of those had a known clinical significance. The assumption was that for the others a clinical significance might later be
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