Repost: Doping with the amphetamines

Sports doping is in the news again this week. Some 60 Minutes program accusing Lance Armstrong, yet again, of being a doper who just didn’t get caught. Prof-like Substance has a few thoughts on the matter under a title which questions whether pro cycling can survive if Lance is proven to have doped. Are you kidding? Doping has been with cycling since forever.

I put this up at the original DrugMonkey blog on 8/21/2007.

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We’ll start off our discussions on sports doping with the classic psychomotor stimulants, the amphetamines. You know, good old “speed”. A class of drugs primarily considered indirect dopamine agonists because they bind to the dopamine transporter with good affinity (dopamine reuptake inhibitor) and also act to facilitate dopamine release from the terminal. As with similar compounds they also tend to have some affinity for other monoaminergic transporters and will thus modulate norepinephrine and serotonin. Nevertheless, the major action usually under discussion is to increase dopamine levels in the synapse.

Plan the paper when you plan your project

Advice on paper writing over at NatureJobs is mostly boilerplate but I was struck by the first observation.

 

Consider the final paper when you first plan your project

 

This doesn’t seem as obvious to trainees as one might think, particularly postdocs.

 

Sometimes I think it is the most essential role of the mentor to keep harping on “how is this going to contribute to the story, how is this going to fit into a paper?”