Patrick Arnold, who invented ‘the clear’ steroid at the center of the BALCO drug scandal, dies at 59
By Rebecca Tauber
Patrick Arnold, a chemist who invented the steroid known as “the clear” at the heart of a performance-enhancing drug scandal in the early 2000s, died in Guilford, Conn., on Tuesday at 59. His family said the cause of death is unknown.
Arnold developed different kinds of steroids over his career. The most famous was the drug THG, a liquid administered under the tongue that went undetected in doping tests at the time and was distributed by BALCO, a California lab that worked with high-profile athletes.
A federal investigation in 2003 found that BALCO — which was formally known as the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative and had been founded by Victor Conte in the 1980s — had been selling steroids to athletes. The scandal tarnished the reputations of many of the athletes involved, including baseball players Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, Olympic track champion Marion Jones and football player Bill Romanowski.
During grand jury questioning, Bonds testified that he received and used “the cream and the clear,” but that he did not know they were PEDs. The cream was testosterone-based and used to help mask the presence of steroids. Bonds’ trainer, Greg Anderson, would later serve time for refusing to testify against Bonds in a perjury trial.
In 2006, a federal judge sentenced Arnold to three months in prison and three months of house arrest on a charge of conspiring to distribute steroids. Conte, who died last year, served four months in jail for his role in the scandal.
Arnold saw himself as a victim of the ensuing fallout.
“I was the guy that made the undetectables so I was considered a huge target,” he said on a podcast about chemistry in 2023. “There was no point of fighting on the wrath of the federal government.”
Arnold’s brothers, Steven and John, described him as someone driven by scientific discovery.
“He always was pushing to the next breakthrough,” John said. “His moral compass was, ‘This is about the science, the politics is up to someone else.’”
Arnold began to make a name for himself in the early internet era, creating a following in blogs and chat rooms with his muscle growth and bodybuilding expertise, his brothers said. They recalled him mistakenly signing up for high-level chemistry classes as a college freshman, but succeeding nonetheless. Arnold got his degree in chemistry from the University of New Haven in 1990 and went on to found a lab in Illinois, where he invented drugs, including “the clear.”
Everything changed for Arnold when baseball records began to fall, his brothers said. In 1998, four years before the federal government began investigating BALCO, St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire broke the MLB single-season home run record. McGwire had used androstenedione, a prohormone Arnold helped popularize in the United States, and which the FDA and MLB subsequently banned in 2004. Around the same time, Arnold connected with Conte, who worked with athletes.
“I had everyone in the world coming to me if they knew about it,” Arnold said in 2023 about the drug. “There was no one else in the world doing this.”
“What I did by making these undetectable analogs available, it sort of changed the playing field,” he continued. “Because everyone was sort of doing the same stuff with detectable things and just taking them at different doses and getting off them at the same time, but with my stuff, the people that had access to them had a decidedly big advantage over people that were using their old techniques.”
Arnold wasn’t driven by money, his brothers said, leaving checks uncashed and profiting little from his notoriety in the 2000s, while federal raids doomed his lab. Six months before his death, he posted on LinkedIn about occasionally receiving federal food assistance. Arnold never married or had children and focused primarily on his work.
“The guinea pig for testing products was his own body,” John said. “He was a bit of a mad scientist when it came to that.”
Arnold’s brothers said the stress from the performance-enhancing drug scandal never left him and that he continued to have nightmares about government raids years later. But he continued his scientific research until his death. He was an early researcher into the ketogenic diet. In later years, he focused on areas including epilepsy, muscle wasting and longevity, often writing on LinkedIn and his blog about chemical compounds and health research.
