McGwire’s Secret – Iron Game History – December, 1998

In 1935—the year testosterone was first synthesized in the laboratory—the Food and Drug Administration established a unit to monitor the quality of “glandular” products on the market that were supposed to contain bioactive sex hormones. The only “ethical” issue addressed by this group was the possibility of consumer fraud.1 In fact, by 1941 they had found that more that half of the products they assayed did not meet the requirements of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. But the idea that hormonal drugs might be “abused” outside of the clinic had hardly occurred to the physicians who prescribed them.