thatzone wrote:
Cliff notes?
It's a long article and if you have any interest in doping it's worth reading. But a short summary is that this is Part 1 of a 6 part series. From the article:
"Parts I and II will provide background information on the blood-doping research project, how the primarily Swedish scientists ended up researching the unusual subject matter in the first place and what were the future prospects of the research. Parts III and IV focus on the actual blood-doping research process that took place in Sweden and on how the method became ”invented”. Parts V and VI explain how the research was received internationally when blood doping itself emerged as a subject of heated debate worldwide while the scientific community’s interest was lukewarm at best."
The article summarizes Part 1 this way:
"To summarize Part I, blood-doping research can be understood only as a part of the larger research trend focusing on the limiting factors of maximal oxygen uptake, as there was never a fully independent blood doping research. In simply following the way oxygen molecules move from the air into the muscles, the hemoglobin concentration of blood was a crucial but surprisingly under-researched aspect of that chain, which was given more attention to.
While the research was unique, the idea of testing how use transfusions affected performance wasn’t a totally novel one, because a few research teams had actual infused blood and measured some performance-related variables. But this unsystematic preceding research had focused on elevating hemoglobin concentration in altitude adaptation context and on how changes in actual blood volume (ie. not hemoglobin concentration) affected heart function and circulation and recovery from anemia. Those lines of research differed from what the was now under investigation, and Ekblom recalled that he and Åstrand weren’t aware of this preceding research at that time anyway.
The findings of this new “Swedish” blood doping research of the 1960s were far from certain with many possible outcomes, into which a more detailed account is given in Part II.*
*P-O AÅãstrand and Kaare Rodahl give a far more complex view of the limiting factor question in their 1970 textbook. “For decades a discussion has been going on concerning the ‘limiting factors’ in maximal oxygen uptake, whether it is the oxygen content of the inspired air, the pulmonary ventilation, the diffusion of oxygen from alveolar space to hemoglobin, the hemoglobin content, the blood volume, the ability of the heart to pump blood, the distribution of blood flow, the ability of muscle tissues to receive the offered blood, the diffusion of capillaries to the working cells, the venous blood return, the efficiency of the mitochondria to transfer aerobic energy to the ATP-ADP machinery, access to fuel, the function of the neuromuscular system, or motivation.” (AÅãstrand & Rodahl, 1970)"