Thanks AA, but my IQ has dropped by 20 points. Interestingly, their tests have really good puzzles. You can study them, get the answers, and learn what they are thinking, and re-frame your thinking to attack the tests. If you take the time to learn, you can join Mensa.
I have no idea why most Mensa members support Lance's innocence. What do I think? I don't know what he did. I know when I saw successful premeds drink caffeine, and drug-free I wasn't making the grade, but with it, I excelled. I learned from a pretty good biochemist (ultimately a billionaire biotech entrepreneur)that med students, interns and residents routinely took amphetimines in the 50s and early 60s to get through 36-48 hr no-sleep shifts. They learned to do what they had to, to get through grueling high-perforance regimens.
Amphetimines didn't work for me, for last-minute cramming in college. I learned that I really needed to take notes, make margin notes ASAP after class, rewrite them at night, go to office hours for clarification, study my xme-day and previous notes everynight, make high enough grades to get access to library stacks, camp out, read amazingly informative papers dating back nearly a century (starting with recent papers, reading their references, and then backtracking their references), so I could understand the evolution of scientific thought. I once came upon a Science article with a two-image hemoglobin drawing, with an accompanying red-green pair of glasses. "Oh, 3D hemoglobin structure, this is AMAZING. I SEE! Wow!"
Who comes up with this kind of stuff? Geniuses. Artistic scientists.
Back to Lance. I could envision a poor Dallas-project-raised youngster being informed he could dramatically improve his performance using drugs. And then, being helped to employ drug-detection-defeating agents. I can see how the technology was existent.
For example, I used Rosalyn Yallow's telephone-conversation methodology to get rabbits to produce antibodies to gastrin. I radiolabled the antibodies with Iodine-125. Centrifugation precipitated the gastrin, radiolabeled antibodies. We counted the precipitate. The gastrin left in the solute was really small. But you can majorly reduce circulating EPO by giving antibodies, and letting the immune system do the plasma removal.
Could Lance, or any other cyclist, beat EPO detection? Totally. How about the effects of EPO, generating red blood cells? Easy enough to beat, by diluting rbcs with salt solutions or salt and albumin solutions, to enable high rbc counts to be "masked" in simple hematocrit counts.
Did Lance use drugs, self-transfusions? I have no idea. In an era of rampant performance-enhancement, he was at the top in the TdF. He was a real athlete. Nobody says he didn't work really hard.