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This Month in Journals: Controversy at the Intersection of Doping and Research

This month, the Journal of Applied physiology confronted allegations of scientific misconduct in two cases: one when a study used an athlete who turned out to have been doping, and another when researchers asked participants to use banned methods. The journal invited discussion from many of the scientists involved as well as WADA, with interesting, and antagonistic, results.

“We have recently hypothesized that the optimal approach to altitude training would be to acclimatize to altitude, but train as close to sea level as possible thereby maximizing running speed and maintaining aerobic fitness,” Drs. Jim Stray-Gundersen and Benjamin Levine wrote in a landmark 1992 paper in the International Journal of Sports Medicine. The pair, who then worked at the University of Texas, were trying to answer the question of whether altitude training was truly...