THE DRUG WAR’S CORRUPTING INFLUENCE

Doctors hold banners during a demonstration against a recent wave of crimes and kidnappings in Tijuana, Mexico

Mexico Pays the Price of Prohibition

 

 

 

 

by Mary Anastasia O’Grady

August 18, 2008; Page A13

With the world fixated on Vladimir Putin’s expansionist exploits in Georgia, a different sort of assault against a democracy south of the U.S. border is getting scant attention.

But it is equally alarming.

 

Mexico is engaged in a life-or-death struggle against organized crime. Last week six more law enforcement officials were killed in the line of duty battling the country’s drug cartels. This brings the death toll in President Felipe Calderón’s blitz against

 

A number of the dead have been gangsters but they also include journalists, politicians, judges, police and military, and civilians. For perspective on how violent Mexico has become, consider that the total number of Americans killed in Iraq since March 2003 is 4,142.

 

Kidnapping and armed robbery numbers have also soared. In Tijuana, a kidnapping epidemic has provoked an exodus of upper-middle-class families across the U.S. border in search of safety.

 

As this column has pointed out many times, one reason that security has so deteriorated in the past decade is the demand in the U.S. for illegal narcotics, and the U.S. government’s crackdown on the Caribbean trafficking route. Mexican cartels have risen up to serve the U.S. market, and their earnings have made them rich and well-armed.

 

The victims of last week’s killing spree include the deputy police chief of the state of Michoacan and one of his men, a detective in the state of Chihuahua, and a deputy police chief in the state of Quintana Roo. As of July, 449 police and military officers have died in the Calderón offensive, further underscoring the price Mexico is paying

In a developed country like the U.S., prohibition takes a toll on the rule of law but does not overwhelm it. In Mexico, where a newly revived democracy is trying to reform institutions after 70 years of autocratic governance under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the corrupting influence of drug profits is far more pernicious.

 

According to Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, part of the explanation for the kidnapping surge can be traced to the success of the government’s squeeze on the drug runners. He told me in February that he expected the pressure to produce a fragmentation of the cartels, turf wars and an increase in other criminal activities to replace shrinking profits in drug trafficking.

 

If true, the kidnapping spree might be a sign that Mr. Medina Mora’s strategy is working. But when federal investigators recently fingered Mexico City police in the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Fernando Martí, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur, Mr. Medina Mora’s theory lost some credibility. Rather than being the work of demoralized criminals, kidnapping, in the capital anyway, appears to be just one business run by a well-oiled machine with institutional links.

 

Ricardo Medina, a leading Mexican opinion writer and the editor of El Economista, the country’s top financial daily, told me on Thursday the case shows that “independent of the shooting war on drugs there is the problem of institutions being infiltrated by criminals and corrupted.”

 

Even captured criminals often go free, Mr. Medina says, and all branches of government share responsibility for this crisis of impunity. It is true that judges can be intimidated or bribed. But it is also true, for example, that under Mexican law kidnapping is not a federal crime, and therefore must be handled by local authorities. Often victims do not want to press charges because there is a perception that the local police and local governments are in on it.

 

That perception has been strengthened in the Martí case, but the problem of impunity is hardly new. As Mr. Medina wrote in El Economista on Friday, “impunity is in view of everyone, day after day. We all see it even to the point of smiling ironically or shrugging our shoulders.”

 

Why hasn’t this problem been tackled? One possible explanation in Mexico City is that the district police and the rest of the district’s bureaucracy represent an important constituency for the ruling Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). If the PRD’s base prefers the status quo, there is a high political cost to challenging it.

 

Drug profits going to organized crime only complicate the matter. Writing in the latest issue of the Milken Institute Review, former U.S. foreign service officer Laurence Kerr takes a page out of U.S. history. “America has been in Mexico’s shoes: flush with the bounty of illegal liquor sales, organized crime thoroughly penetrated the U.S. justice system during Prohibition. As long as Americans willingly bury Mexican drug traffickers in greenbacks, progress in constraining the trade is likely to be limited.” Regrettably, Mexico’s institutional reform will also be limited and the death toll will keep climbing.

 

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com

 

GANG GREEN: Is Environmentalism The New Totalitarianism?

By STEPHEN MOORE
August 15, 2008; Page W9

Earlier this month, while visiting a friend in San Francisco, I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: “S.F. Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Bay Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt. And San Francisco considers itself one of the most progressive cities in America!

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion — with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes. Back then I was a devoted recycler, but not for sentimental reasons. It was the financial incentive: You got up to a nickel for every bottle you brought back to the grocery store. So I would scavenge the landscape to find unredeemed bottles to buy baseball cards and candy.

Read whole column:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121876314203443039.html?mod=taste_primary_hs

Why We Are Not In A Great Depression

Todd G. Buchholz. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Aug 15, 2008. pg. W.9

I slapped the side of my television in April when economist Joe Stiglitz called this the worst recession “since the Great Depression.” But now the economy is not only hurting homeowners; it’s apparently harming parakeets, too! An AP item reports that pet owners are abandoning their furry and feathery friends to animal shelters because they can no longer afford to feed them. Never mind that GDP is puttering along in positive terrain. Headlines still scream that we’re closing in on 1929, not 2009.

Are we a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm put it a little while ago, getting himself kicked off John McCain’s advisory team? No, the American public is not whining. One reason may be that consumers are swallowing $13 billion of pick-me-uppers like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil. (A doctor friend who volunteered at a sleepaway camp said that, every morning, 20% of the kids lined up for their psychomeds.) More likely, though, Americans are just leaving the whining to pundits and trend reporters. The fellow who filed the pet story did not bother to point out that, in this alleged new Great Depression, the Pet Products Manufacturers Association says that Americans have spent 5% more this year on their pooches and pussies than last year.

Where are the Hoovervilles camped out under the Washington Monument? Where are the soup lines? Willie Nelson is still on tour, beseeching us to save the family farm. But it must be tougher for him to gin up support when the typical American farm, thanks in part to ever expanding ethanol subsidies, has see its annual income surge 50% past its 10-year average. Apparently Willie is traveling on a biodiesel, soybean-fed bus. So now we know at least what Willie’s bus is smoking.

The fact is that most Americans get up in the morning to work hard, feed their families and pay for soccer uniforms and maybe a vacation, if they can stand the security lines at the airport. Most Americans don’t let whining get in the way of work. That separates us from the French, who would join a picket line to protest against picket lines. The problem with whining, as with socialism, is that it requires too many evenings. And forget about the organized whining that we know as social activism. That requires too many meetings and too many covered- dish dinners too. I’m still not sure what Barack Obama accomplished as a professional “community organizer.” I doubt he was another Martin Luther King, but I’m pretty certain he carried a lot of macaroni salad.

Sure, we gripe about higher food prices and shaky home prices, but we are still living “La Vida Latte,” lining up every morning before a barista and otherwise indulging in the imperatives of the good life. Yes, the share price of Starbucks has sunk of late, but Americans spent more, not less, at Starbucks last year than the year before. And if you add premium coffee sales at McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, the growth rate of this liquid luxury has soared. I should point out that the price of a Starbucks latte is about $1,200 a barrel. Makes that SUV fill-up a little easier to swallow, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, Prius cars are flying off the Toyota lots, even though they cost $3,700 more than a similarly sized gasoline-fired Toyota and it takes 3.5 years to pay back the investment in fuel savings. The ageless Paul McCartney’s spanking new Lexus LS600h will take him 102 years. Rock on, Sir Paul.

Of course, these are high-end luxury items, the kinds you see at the Kennedy compound when you look at it from Martha’s Vineyard, hoping never to see a windmill blocking your view. But even the situation for middle-class Americans is not all that dire. In July the jobless rate among college graduates was just 2.4%, drifting up from 2.1% in March. That is miles away from the 1981 recession and, of course, you’d need scientific notation to compare it to the Great Depression, no matter what the Obama campaign says. The job market, while weak, has not collapsed.

Each Thursday morning I look at weekly jobless claims — how many people trudged up to state unemployment offices, pink slips in hand. That number has hovered under 500,000. To match up to the level of 1981-82 layoffs, it would have to explode to 1.2 million. It won’t. Moreover, a big proportion of the layoffs are coming among 16-24 year olds, who are not yet supporting a household.

So, no, we are not whining — in part because we do not have much to whine about, whatever the hysterical headlines might say. But don’t pop champagne corks yet. For some, it still feels lousy out there. But lousy is not a technical synonym for recession. On the lower end of the income spectrum, we have deep problems, both economic and sociological.

Back in the ’60s a high-school graduate could still make good money, especially if he learned a trade. That’s because almost every other adolescent in the world lacked a high-school degree. We were about the only country that educated teenagers. But now the rest of the world has caught up, and Americans are undereducated or ill-educated. High schools don’t teach what they used to, and so students who don’t go to college are left without the skills necessary to compete in a global economy. Forget the Beijing Olympics. In math-science competitions, the U.S. is the Jamaican bobsled team of education.

Most Americans who suffer layoffs do not deserve blame. It is more likely that their incompetent, often overpaid, bosses do. Still, no president, Democrat or Republican, can create prosperity for those who decide to forgo even a basic education. Our problem is not whining. It is persuading young people that, with baby boomers retiring, entitlement programs bulging and the world economy growing ever more competitive, now’s the time to roll up the sleeves for something other than tattoos.

As for hysterical journalists, I’m waiting for a reporter to tell us that pet owners can’t even afford the paper to line their animals’ cages. That would be a shame, because it’s about all those papers are good for.

Enviromania: Will Obama’s Energy Plan Sacrifice Growth For Climate Goals?

Enviromania
August 7, 2008; Page A11

For years, hyperactive environmentalists have burned votive candles to the spirit in the sky, hoping she’d levitate energy prices high enough to make alternatives to oil economically feasible. That day has come. Result: The oil has hit the fan.

With gasoline over $4 and with life as they love it in the suburbs being shut down, did people call for the windmills? Nope. A heavy majority want to drill the bejeezus out of anywhere in America we can find familiar black slop.

 No one has been hit harder by this unexpected truth than Nancy Pelosi and her green brigades.

Fearful of an up-or-down vote on drilling for oil in, of all places, our own country, the Pelosi House and Harry Reid’s Senate shut down Congress. House Minority Leader John Boehner calls drilling the greatest issue Republicans have had in his political lifetime. A party flat on its back is ready to run on oil pumps.

Why stop there?

 

Republicans shouldn’t settle for making the world safe for SUVs. What’s going on here is about more than $4 gasoline.

When Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats spent a week holding the people’s chamber under house arrest, they made plain a political vulnerability beyond drilling. To achieve greenhouse gas goals in the out-years, they are willing to risk a slowdown now in the American economy. How else can you interpret what happened this week? These Democrats aren’t environmentalists. They’re enviromaniacs.

An environmentalist with two feet on the planet is someone who admits that fixing what economists call “externalities,” such as air pollution or climate effects, requires a balance between those goals and protecting the productive economy.

AP

An enviromaniac is the sort of person who would say: “Breaking our oil addiction . . . will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.” The complete transformation of our economy?

So said Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in his major energy statement this Monday. Though the speech had hedged bows to oil, coal and nuclear, it was overwhelmingly a Goreian jeremiad about “building” a new economy on a promise called renewables.

“We can see shuttered factories open their doors to manufacturers that sell wind turbines and solar panels that will power our homes and our businesses,” he said. “We can watch as millions of new jobs with good pay and good benefits are created.” This will “meet our moral obligations to future generations.”

Whoa. “Millions” of new jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, and this is to “meet our moral obligations?”

Virtue aside, here’s the biggest problem with Sen. Obama and Democratic enviromania: It’s a risky roll of the dice with the U.S. economy.

The economy we’ve got works. We know that carbon makes the U.S. economy run like a Swiss watch (transportation, distribution, production, commuting). The bet between carbon inputs and growing American outputs is virtually 1:1.

Mr. Obama and his Democratic colleagues in Congress want a “complete transformation” of an already successful economy. Not partial. complete. Can any of them say what the odds are that all this economic activity, including the nation’s electrical grid, will work as well with their new fuels? Assuredly, growth’s odds aren’t as good as the ones we have now.

Sen. Obama: “I will not pretend we can achieve [my goals] without cost or without sacrifice.” Might this mean foregoing some GDP for five to 10 years? “Growth” appears in Mr. Obama’s speech only to describe the “clean energy sector.”

The problem with Democratic enviromania is that it’s uncoupled from the realities of a nation whose economy has to compete now with the Chinas and Indias of the world, whose high growth rates use proven energy sources.

Republicans this fall should push their argument beyond drilling. Drilling is mainly a proxy for one’s understanding of the U.S. economy. The Democrats and Mr. Obama showed this week they are so in thrall to Al Gore’s big climate bet that they’d risk having a slow-growth economy. The GOP should run on High Growth America as a better bet than Democratic Slow Growth.

Instead of enviro-messianism, they should propose a drill-to-transition for whatever energy source can prove it works at a nonsacrificial price — shale, coal gasification, nuclear, solar or some combination. (Windmill farms are a pox on the land.)

Don’t be oil-industry deniers. Mr. Obama and Rep. Pelosi want to hammer and punish the only players on the field who actually know how to put massive amounts of energy on the grid. Don’t we want them using their resources to drill here, rather than off in some godforsaken place producing gushers of cash for people who want to pound us into a hole? We need Smart Oil on our side for at least 10 years.

Democrats this week chose the prayer of alternative energy over proven prosperity. They’ve handed prosperity in the here-and-now to the Republicans. Run with it.

Is Obama “The Green Hornet”?–WSJ Says Obama Energy Policy Not Right For America

August 6, 2008; Page A14

Al Gore said the other day that “the future of human civilization” depends on giving up fossil fuels within a decade — and was acclaimed as a prophet by the political class. Obviously boring reality doesn’t count for much these days. Even so, when Barack Obama wheels out an energy agenda nearly as grandiose as Mr. Gore’s, shouldn’t it receive at least some media scrutiny?

On Monday, Mr. Obama said that the U.S. must “end the age of oil in our time,” with “real results by the end of my first term in office.” This, he said, will “take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy.” Mark that one down as the understatement of the year. Maybe Mr. Obama really is the Green Hornet, or some other superhero of his current political myth.

The Senator calls for $150 billion over 10 years to achieve “energy independence,” with elevated subsidies for renewable alternatives and efficiency programs. He also says he’ll “leverage billions more in private capital to build a new energy economy,” euphemistically referring to his climate plan to tax and regulate greenhouse gases. Every President since Nixon has declared “energy independence,” as Mr. Obama noted. But this time, he says, things will change.

They won’t. And not because of “the old politics,” or whatever. Currently, alternative sources — wind, solar, biomass, hydroelectric and geothermal — provide less than 7% of yearly domestic consumption. Throw out hydro and geothermal, and it’s only 4%. For the foreseeable future, renewables simply cannot provide the scale and volume of energy needed to meet growing U.S. demand, which is expected to increase by 20% over the next two decades. Even with colossal taxpayer subsidies, renewables probably can’t even slow the rate of growth of carbon-based fuel consumption, much less replace it.

Take wind power, which has grown rapidly though still only provides about two-thirds of 1% of all U.S. electricity. The Energy Department optimistically calculates that ramping up merely to 20% by 2030 would require more than $2 trillion and turbines across the Midwest “wind corridor,” plus multiple offshore installations. And we’ll need a new “transmission superhighway system” of more than 12,000 miles of electric lines to connect the wind system to population centers. A mere $150 billion won’t cut it. Mr. Obama also didn’t mention that this wind power will be more expensive than traditional sources like coal.

Wind, too, is intermittent: It isn’t always blowing and can’t be accessed on demand when people need electricity. Since there’s no cost-effective way to store large amounts of electricity, wind requires “spinning reserve,” or nonalternative baseload power to avoid blackouts. That baseload power is now provided largely by coal, nuclear and natural gas, and wind can’t displace much. The same problem afflicts solar energy — now one-hundredth of 1% of net U.S. electric generation. One of the top uses of solar panels is to heat residential swimming pools.

Mr. Obama also says he wants to mandate that all new cars and trucks are “flexible fuel” vehicles, meaning that they can run on higher concentrations of corn ethanol mixed with gasoline, or second-generation biofuels if those ever come onto the market. Like wind and solar, this would present major land use problems: According to credible estimates, land areas larger than the size of Texas would need to be planted with fuel feedstocks to displace just half the oil America imports every day. Meanwhile, the economic distortions caused by corn ethanol — such as higher food prices — have been bad enough.

And yet there’s more miracle work to do. Mr. Obama promises to put at least one million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2015. That’s fine if consumers want to buy them. But even if technical battery problems are overcome, this would only lead to “fuel switching” — if cars don’t use gasoline, the energy still has to come from somewhere. And the cap-and-trade program also favored by Mr. Obama would effectively bar new coal plants, while new nuclear plants are only now being planned after a 30-year hiatus thanks to punishing regulations and lawsuits.

Problems like these are the reality of “alternative” energy, and they explain why every “energy independence” plan has faltered since the 1970s. But just because Mr. Obama’s plan is wildly unrealistic doesn’t mean that a program of vast new taxes, subsidies and mandates wouldn’t be destructive. The U.S. has a great deal invested in fossil fuels not because of a political conspiracy or because anyone worships carbon but because other sources of energy are, right now, inferior.

Consumption isn’t rising because of wastefulness. The U.S. produces more than twice as much GDP today per unit of energy as it did in the 1950s, yet energy use has risen threefold. That’s because energy use is tethered to growth, and the economy continues to innovate and expand. Mr. Obama seems to have other ideas.

See all of today’s editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

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Scientists Turn Skin Cells Into Motor Neurons in ALS Patients

Feat could one day lead to tailor-made cells to treat fatal disease, researchers say

Posted July 31, 2008

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) — Scientists have turned skin cells from patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease into motor neurons that are genetically identical to the patients’ own neurons.

An unlimited number of these neurons can now be created and studied in the laboratory, a capability which should result in a better understanding of the disease and, one day, lead to new treatments or even the production of healthy cells that can replace the diseased ones.

“The hope of some scientists is that they might be able to harness stem cells and program them to generate pluripotent stem cell lines [capable of differentiating into many different types of cells] which have the genes of patients,” said Kevin Eggan, co-author of a paper appearing July 31 in the online version of Science. “This would open up the possibility of producing a large supply of immune-matched cells to that patient that could be used in transplantation methodologies.”

“The other hope, and one that’s much closer upon us . . . is if you could produce the cell types that become sick in that person, you might be able to use them in the laboratory to come to understand basic aspects of the disease and take the study of disease out of patients, where it’s very difficult, and put it into the Petri dish,” added Eggan, who is a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and spoke about the research at a teleconference Wednesday.

However, the actual therapeutic potential of this approach is still years away.

Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is caused by the degeneration and death of spinal motor neurons, which carry messages from the spinal cord to the body’s muscles. This leads to paralysis of muscles and, eventually, death. Some 30,000 people in the United States suffer from the disease, which has no cure.

“We don’t at all fully understand [ALS], and it is our lack of understanding of that disease process which we believe is preventing us from developing more effective [treatments],” said Christopher Henderson, a co-author on the paper and co-director of the Center for Motor Neuron Biology and Disease at Columbia University. “Because the disease process is happening in the spinal cord in the central nervous system of patients, we don’t at all have access to living examples of the neurons that are undergoing the disease process. . . . No way could we go to ALS patients and take samples of their motor neurons.”

The scientists had originally planned to use somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), or “therapeutic cloning,” to try to accomplish this feat. That process involves removing the genetic material from a donated human oocyte and replacing it with genetic material from the skin cells of patients. The approach has been hindered by political, ethical and other obstacles.

Instead, researchers decided to take adult skin cells from two elderly sisters (aged 82 and 89) with a genetic form of ALS and reprogrammed them into cells resembling embryonic stem cells using a technique called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. iPS has already been successfully used to reprogram healthy adult cells.

This study was the first to apply the technique to cells from ill patients.

Those embryonic stem cells were then transformed into motor neurons, although it’s not yet clear if the cells will suffer from the same disease process.

Although only about 2 percent of people with ALS suffer from this particular form of the disease, Eggan and Henderson believe the approach has promise for studying other forms of the disease. In fact, the research team is already working on producing similar cell lines from patients with the “sporadic” form of the disease.

It was also encouraging that the feat was accomplished in the two of the oldest, if not the oldest, ALS patients in the United States. Researchers didn’t know if the ravages of the disease might have interfered with their ability to reprogram the cells.

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether iPS will eliminate the need for somatic cell nuclear transfer. Eggan said it won’t.

“There are still several important caveats for these cells that we’ve made that are important to be aware of,” Eggan said. For one thing, the cells were infected with genetically modified viruses, making them potentially dangerous to humans. Future research will no doubt focus on ways to replace those viruses with chemicals.

“[But], for the moment, we’re going to have to press forward with SCNT research just in case that doesn’t work out,” Eggan said. So far, though, no one knows if human SCNT is even possible.

More information

Visit the ALS Association for more on Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

AICAR: Scientists Have Put Exercise In a Pill

Researchers experiment with a chemical compound that they say can produce the benefits of aerobic activity without the work.

By Alan Zarembo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 1, 2008

Scientists have discovered what could be the ultimate workout for couch potatoes: exercise in a pill.

In experiments on mice that did no exercise, the chemical compound, known as AICAR, allowed them to run 44% farther on a treadmill than those that did not receive the drug.

The drug appeared to change the physical composition of muscle, essentially transforming the tissue from sugar-burning fast-twitch fibers to fat-burning slow-twitch ones, the same change that occurs in distance runners and cyclists through training, according to research released Thursday.

“You’re getting the benefits of exercise without having to do any work,” said David Mangelsdorf, a pharmacologist at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not connected with the research.

It is unknown if the drug has any benefit for athletes who actually work out — or for any human, for that matter, since the research has so far only involved mice.

Though the chemical pathways that transform muscle cells appear to be the same in mice and humans, Michael Rennie, a physiologist at the University of Nottingham in England, said that AICAR did not activate human pathways at the doses research subjects received in a study he conducted of the drug’s potential to treat diabetes.

“Mice are not men,” Rennie said. “Rats and mice are much more metabolically unstable than human beings.”

Nonetheless, lead researcher Ronald Evans, a molecular physiologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, said he has already been contacted by dozens of athletes and overweight people who have heard about his research from lectures.

One request came from a horse trainer who was interested in trying AICAR out on a thoroughbred, he said. Evans declined.

“Anything that could provide half of a quarter of 1% is attractive,” said Dr. Don Catlin, a professor emeritus of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA and a top anti-doping expert. “The athlete who can find a way to get an edge is one up on his competitors.”

Evans said he had notified world anti-doping officials, who are now scrambling to implement a test for it before the Beijing Olympics start next week.

The compound, which is naturally produced in tiny amounts in human muscle cells and has been studied for decades, is readily available through scientific supply companies. One company was offering AICAR for $120 a gram. At that price, giving a person the drug in the same concentration the mice got would cost thousands of dollars a day.

Evans predicted that in the wake of his study, published in the journal Cell, the drug would “fly off the shelves.”

AICAR has been tested in humans for a variety of conditions. “It was found to be a quite safe drug, at least at the doses we were using,” said chemist Paul Laikind, who began testing it in the 1980s as a means of preserving blood flow to the heart during surgery.

Drug maker Schering-Plough Corp. is trying to develop it as an intravenous infusion for use during bypasses.

With more research, scientists said, the drug’s fat-burning properties could also help reduce weight, ward off diabetes, prevent heart disease and restore the fitness of bedridden patients.

The discovery of AICAR as a potential couch-potato exercise pill grew out of Evans’ continuing research on the physiology of muscle cells.

In 2004, he made headlines for engineering “marathon mice.” By injecting a single gene into the nucleus of a fertilized egg, he created mice born with more efficient muscles, faster metabolisms and stronger hearts.

Evans wanted to know if it was possible to achieve the same effect using a drug.

His team started not with AICAR but with another compound known as GW1516, which drug maker GlaxoSmithKline is trying to develop to raise levels of HDL, or good cholesterol. The drug is known to stimulate the production of a protein known as PPARd, which in turn activates the genes that boost endurance in muscle cells.

In sedentary mice, the drug had no effect on endurance. Only when the drug was combined with exercise did it give the mice an advantage. After five weeks of training, mice that got the drug were able to run for an average of three hours and 24 minutes, a 68% improvement over mice that received only training.

When the researchers dissected the test mice, they found that the number of high-efficiency muscle fibers had increased 29%. “That’s a huge increase,” Evans said. “That’s the kind of stuff that Lance Armstrong and endurance athletes aim for.”

The experiment might have ended there, but after Evans submitted the paper for publication last year, one academic reviewer wanted to know why the drug had transformed the fibers only with exercise.

The reviewer surmised that the answer could be found somewhere in the complex chain of chemical reactions that energize muscle cells during exercise.

Evans decided to try AICAR because it closely resembles a nucleotide that prompts the production of an enzyme that activates the high-endurance genes.

To Evans’ surprise, the experiment worked. When sedentary mice were fed the drug daily for four weeks, they were able to run an average of 1,795 feet on a treadmill, 44% farther than mice that had received a placebo.

The researchers now plan to test whether AICAR or GW1516 can increase endurance beyond the maximum that can be achieved by intensive training alone.

In the meantime, Evans said, his team has developed detection protocols for both compounds and their breakdown products and turned them over to the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal.

He said it was unclear whether the tests would be in place for the Olympics.

Frederic Donze, a spokesman for the association, said in an e-mail that the organization “does not indicate when it implements new detection means or methods.”

But, he added, it is not crucial for the tests to be in place now.

“A number of anti-doping organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, store doping control samples of their events for eight years for potential future retesting and detection as anti-doping science advances,” Donze said.

alan.zarembo@latimes.com