Professor Jock McLean on Drugs in Horse Racing...

Jill Weeks Chair for the day introduced her long time friend and neighbour to address us on the role of Racing Analytical Services Ltd in combating the use of performance enhancing drugs in the horse and greyhound racing industries in Australia.   Key is of course the timely detection of the presence of a drug. 

Professor Jock McLean, veterinarian, both in practice and academia,  and a founder of  Racing Analytical Services,  has had years of experience with 'all creatures great and small’.   With first, training and qualification as veterinary scientist,  and later Ph. D in bio-medicine, he proved not only to be very knowledgeable but entertaining as he lead us through the topic suitably titled  "Speeding Them Up or Slowing Them Down-From Poisons to Peptides".

Race horse owners (as a show of hands of the relevant members present concurred) have always had that intrinsic desire to get that edge to make their animal go faster.   Noting that 95 % of thoroughbred gallopers all stem from one stallion Daley Arabian and hence the same genes, perhaps it is not surprising that over the years other means have been exploited.  The use of stimulants has a long history--it starts with chariot races in Roman Days.   Early 20th century practices involved "tonics" containing poisons such arsenic, strychnine and even snake venom.  Sophistication follows with time and now-a-days highly complex organic molecules, such as proteins and protein fragments are available, hence the peptide reference in the title.    

The integrity of the horse racing and greyhound industries is critical.  So too is the welfare of the animals.  Hence it is important to eradicate the use of these performance altering drugs.  Key is the detection.  The audience was taken back to hear that stimulants at the milligram level and lower can enhance performance---actually not faster but just greater endurance.   

Today Analytical Services is one of the leading relevant laboratories/organisations in the world with its own library of 350,000 substances earmarked, and access to data bases containing 2 Million.  Set up in 1986, it now has a wide range of complex expensive instrumentation and detector units, e.g. mass spectrometers, and which Jock noted provide extremely high detection sensitivities.   The use of his example "fraction of a drop in a swimming pool" highlighted this point.    Sterile sampling and handling systems becomes important.

Therapeutic drugs are permitted, but also tested for, as their use is restricted to given pre race periods.   The prospect of genetic manipulation has been considered, already racehorse DNA's are catalogued.

The extent to which complex scientific technologies are now key in sport was illuminating.   Skilled scientists were needed.  As in other aspects of our community,  Jock perceived that there was a shortage of trained science based technicians and a limited focus on science subjects at the school level.  This was a concern.