I often get asked by young guys how I got into the supplement industry as a researcher and product formulator, and how they can do the same. The fact of the matter is that there is nothing in college you can learn regarding bodybuilding science other than the obvious background fundamentals such as biology and chemistry. I try to convey this to these guys and explain to them that I was self-taught and that the story of how I ended up where I am is not something they will probably ever be able to recreate. Unfortunately they don't seem to really understand this, so still they ask the same questions over and over again. So I figured that this month it might be fun to start telling the story of how I got to be involved in this industry as a chemist and a supplement company owner.

New Joisey

I guess I will start my story back when I got out of college in 1990 and went to work at a chemical company in New Jersey, because that is really when all the madness started. I had received a bachelor’s of science in chemistry the summer before and that fall, I got hired at this place that did specialty chemical work (mostly polymers for cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries). I was hired to do organic synthesis work for a team there and that involved doing a bunch of reactions all the time that pretty much was the same thing every day. I also did some analytical testing of the stuff I made. It became quite boring very quickly.

Of course during this time, I was also working out and had a deep interest in health and performance enhancement. I tried to read what I could in the magazines that were out there and decipher truth from fact. I have to say I was quite gullible then and fell for a lot of the crap. One case of this in particular was the yohimbe bark extract they used to push at the time. They claimed it contained testosterone (which of course is BS) and that if you took enough of the stuff, it would be like taking steroids. So I bought a lot of it and took a lot of caps and well, felt pretty much nothing. So then after reading a little fundamental stuff on testosterone, I determined that it was not working because I was taking it orally. I needed to get the testosterone out of the yohimbe and figure out something to do with it from there. I then proceeded to try and extract the testosterone from the yohimbe bark extract with solvents, and when I did, I got this yellowish, greenish crap. I know testosterone is not yellow-green so I was perplexed, and my instrumental analysis of the stuff revealed nothing that looked like testosterone at all. Bummer.

I had to figure out what was going on, so I went to the chemistry library in the building I worked at and looked up yohimbe, trying to find a reference on testosterone. I used a group of books called Chemical Abstracts (CA), which are pretty much a compilation of all chemistry-related articles that have ever been published. I found nothing. It then occurred to me that I had been duped and that the supplement companies were completely full of crap. I know it sounds obvious today, but back then it was not to most people, so this was quite an awakening for me.

It was at this point I figured if I can't get stuff that worked through the supplement stores, I would have to make my own stuff. It was also at this time when I started subscribing to a newsletter called the Anabolic Research Update, which was written by a guy named Bill Phillips out in Colorado. These quarterly (I think they were quarterly), stapled pamphlets talked about steroids and other performance-enhancement drugs in a very frank and practical manner. It was the first time I had ever read anything about steroids in such depth and such honesty, and I really was fascinated by the whole thing.

Now, I was not completely naive to steroids. I had done a cycle once a couple of years back of what was supposed to be generic oxandrolone (I later found out through the Phillips pamphlets it was probably methyltestosterone) and I gained about 8 pounds and quite a bit of strength. I knew that the stuff could be like magic, however I did not really hang around the steroid dealer folks, as back then in northern Jersey, these guys were a bunch of assholes I wanted nothing to do with. Besides, I had access to a lab and I was pretty unsupervised. I also had an excellent chemistry library in my building, which I knew held the answers to all my questions if I just looked hard enough.

One thing you have to keep in mind here is that this was several years before the Internet became available to regular folks, so all my research involved painstaking scouring of pages and pages of small print. And then, if there were an article of interest that was not readily available to me, I would have to travel to a library that had the article. Often this would mean driving up to 50 miles or more and finding a college library somewhere that had whatever I was looking for and then photocopying it and driving back. I really was quite driven by my intellectual curiosity, though so it was something I had no choice but to do, and I did it with enthusiasm.

So I began to complement my knowledge from the Phillips pamphlets (and Duchaine’s Underground Handbook, which I recently learned about) with objective scientific data on steroids. I went way back into the literature and read the articles written when steroids were being developed and I really learned a lot of vital and fundamental stuff that was never mentioned in the steroid handbooks. I also read up on how to synthesize many different anabolic steoroids and set about planning some rogue experiments in my lab.

Many of the syntheses for steroids were too complex for my abilities at the time, or required equipment that I did not have ready access to. Many also required several steps or raw materials that I could not procure. However, there were some simple steroids that were within my capacity to manufacture, and these included the ones that could easily be made from the four raw materials I could get my hands on through Aldrich Chemical research supply: - 4-androstenedione, dehydroepiandrosterone, epiandrosterone and 1,4-androstadienedione. From these four chemicals I could make— in order— testosterone, 17alpha-methyltestosterone, mestanolone (17alpha-methyl-DHT) and boldenone.

During my research on how to make testosterone, I learned there were several methods. The most common synthetic raw material, as I mentioned, was 4-androstenedione so I did a lot of scouring the CA for references on 4-androstenedione. One day while I was doing this, I ran across an odd reference to an East German patent which seemed to indicate you could get performance-enhancement effects from 4-androstenedione by simply ingesting it, either orally or nasally. I thought that was pretty cool at the time, but I still understood that I would get much more bang for my buck by turning the 4-androstenedione into testosterone (4-androstenedione was not cheap through Aldrich). Nevertheless, the patent stuck in my mind and it would end up being one of the most important references I would ever stumble across.

So I got to work in my lab and after several blunders, was able to make my first homemade steroid. It was mestanolone and I tried the stuff for several weeks and must say, I liked it a lot! I got very strong— as strong as I ever did on anything— on what today would be considered to be a very light cycle. I later went on to make testosterone and boldenone, which I formulated into small chain esters and suspensions, most of which hurt so damn much they were useless. I also made a decent share of methyltestosterone and methyltestosterone/methandrostenolone mixtures, which were decent oral products.

As time went by, I unfortunately ended up researching other substances that had nothing to do with bodybuilding, one of which was addicting and ended up giving me tremendous trouble …eventually causing me to lose my job through a positive drug screening. Before I left my job, though, I managed to scrounge up some of what I made and some reference material (including an old Merck index I still have today), and went home to live in humility at my folks’ place in Connecticut.

Misc.Fitness.Weights

The year was 1994 and I was unemployed and becoming a huge annoyance to my folks. I had been taking grad school classes at night in New Jersey, so I enrolled in graduate school for the spring of 1995 to take full-time courses toward a graduate degree at UCONN. However, that was still a few months away and my moping around the house was getting quite boring and as I mentioned, irritating to my folks. I convinced my mother to buy a computer, though, which ended up keeping me busy and out of everyone's hair.

I remember reading in magazines at the time about this cool new thing called the Internet, which people were logging onto with their computers using phone lines and then interacting with other people and retrieving information from remote sources. I thought this was one of the coolest things I ever heard of, so I went out and bought one of those "Internet for Dummies" books so I could join in on the fun. Well I must have been dumber than the average dummy, because this was some complicated shit to me (I was pretty computer illiterate and still am to some degree). I was able to figure out how to log on and I spent several weeks staring at the screen waiting for things to download, which took seemingly forever. And then when I would get to a site, I found that the information there was inaccessible or available in a form that utterly perplexed me. I still thought it was cool though, in that I was somehow reaching out over the phone lines and traveling to databases all over the world.

After a little while, I found out about these things called “usenet newsgroups” which were basically horribly formatted interactive bulletin boards covering hundreds of different subjects. I joined several of them, including alt.drugs and misc.fitness. It was on misc.fitness that things got very interesting. Way back then, the people on that board weren’t knowledgeable and were naive, not to mention extremely judgmental and intolerant. I found it rough at first, as I was an outsider and instead of trying to kiss up to the esteemed senior members, I would fight back at them. Eventually, I became accepted by a few of the folks there who were apparently pretty blown away with my extensive knowledge on certain things.

Misc.fitness eventually turned into misc.fitness.weights and by the time I entered graduate school, there were several new and interesting members on board. Guys like Bruce Kneller, Will Brink and my idol Dan Duchaine would often post on there. My knowledge on steroids and other drugs caught the eye of people like Duchaine and it was not long until I got the reputation as an up-and-coming “junior guru.” I started sharing information with Duchaine through private e-mail, involving among other things, a supplement idea I had about an anabolic isoflavone I had discovered back during my New Jersey days. I was starting to realize that I might have a future in the bodybuilding supplement industry, which was an incredibly exciting prospect to me. Applying my chemistry and science knowledge to fitness and making a living out of it was like a dream come true to me, and as days went by, I became less and less interested in my grad school studies and more and more interested in pursuing supplement research. I was at a turning point in my life…

MORE TO COME NEXT MONTH!