Getbig.com: American Bodybuilding, Fitness and Figure
Getbig Main Boards => Gossip & Opinions => Topic started by: Ron on May 12, 2026, 08:15:04 PM
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News that Patrick Arnold passing away at the age of 59 is all over the internet world today. RIP
Who was Patrick Arnold...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Arnold
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From Jerry Hornback: One of my longest friends in the industry has passed. Anyone who knows me, knows that Pat and I were friends long before BALCO. He was literally the man who painstakingly taught me about supplementation, and every tip and hack you could think of. Pat was more than generous to me over the years, including a time period where we even discussed moving part of his manufacturing process to Louisville. He was the greatest mind our industry has seen, and truly never got nearly enough credit (or compensation) for the things he developed and brought to market. I’ll always remember his dry, sarcastic sense of humor. We used to laugh after he would do a podcast, because no one ever asked him the good questions. He would always say “you should be the one doing the interview”, because I was so familiar with his research and background. Thank you Pat (and Lakhan) for always being so welcoming during the Ergo days.
From Matt Weik: I just got the news that Patrick Arnold has passed. Man, he and I go way back in the industry. He was one of the greatest minds the sports nutrition industry ever had. May he rest in peace.
From Jerry Brainum; I just learned that Pat Arnold has passed away at the age of 59. No cause of death was listed, but apparently he had been in poor health recently. Pat is considered the "father of prohormone supplements," having introduced androstenedione and others in the late 90s. He got into trouble for synthesizing designer steroids that were involved in the infamous Balco scandal. Victor Conte, who ran that operation died not long ago. Pat was a legitimate chemist who had also studied organic synthesis, which provided him with the knowledge to produce various compounds that were popular with athletes and bodybuilders. I interviewed him years ago, and found him highly intelligent, although a bit subdued. I would occasionally keep in touch with him here on Facebook. From what I understand, he was in the process of producing a few new compounds that had probable use in sports and bodybuilding. I'm saddened to learn of of his death at such a young age. I'm not impressed by most of the self-styled "experts"but Pat was a true chemical expert. May He rest in Peace.
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RIP
Seemed like a true Getbigger at heart.
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RIP. We still have Mike Arnold though.
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I used to talk to him quite a bit on the Avant Labs forum
Watching him tear up Rich Gaspari and his pro hormone minions was always entertaining
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RIP
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Fuck. RIP Patrick. I knew of him since I got on the internet and I still occasionally checked up on him to see what was going on with him on FB, just did the other day.
He came across as stupid a lot of times through his FB posts. He seemed to have a lot of problems with drugs and I wondered if he was really altered a lot of the times he posted.
He was one of the real experts in this game and had huge influence on drug and supplementation trends. I had the impression he never got much money out of it all, even though he was the brains in the BALCO affair and so on. This sucks even though I had no personal contact with him.
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This is very sad. RIP Pat.
I used to talk to him quite a bit on the Avant Labs forum
I remember that place -- just lurked, though, never posted. Truly that was the golden age of forums. I wonder how Par Deus is holding up.
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This is very sad. RIP Pat.
I remember that place -- just lurked, though, never posted. Truly that was the golden age of forums. I wonder how Par Deus is holding up.
That was my first forum I posted on. It was considered "intellectual" and science driven :D I recall my first post, "who are the experts?" as I wanted to know who to follow for cutting edge info.
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RIP. He was a wild man on the old misc.fitness.weights years ago. Duchaine, Conte, Arnold..... most of that old guard is gone.
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PIP to the Chemist
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Dude carved out his niche in the PED world for sure. Those were the Wild West days.
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RIP. He was a wild man on the old misc.fitness.weights years ago. Duchaine, Conte, Arnold..... most of that old guard is gone.
Those were the days ...
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I took Andro for a a while. RIP
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This is very sad. RIP Pat.
I remember that place -- just lurked, though, never posted. Truly that was the golden age of forums. I wonder how Par Deus is holding up.
I wonder how Benson is doing
I’d pm PA all the time with questions and theories and he was always cool as fuck to answer
I’d did the same with Dante as well. They both helped me get down to a legit 6% bf
My memory isn’t too good. I wanna say from 2000-2005/2006. Yes that forum was absolute fire
Not sure we’ll see anything like that again.
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Was Patrick the one that had that internet beef with Bruce Kneller or am I thinking of someone else?
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Was Patrick the one that had that internet beef with Bruce Kneller or am I thinking of someone else?
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He also had a one-sided battle with Bill Phillips / EAS years before, because he reportedly showed up to a big EAS shindig high, passing out, and puking all over. Phillips stopped dealing with him after that.
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He also had a one-sided battle with Bill Phillips / EAS years before, because he reportedly showed up to a big EAS shindig high, passing out, and puking all over. Phillips stopped dealing with him after that.
Can you post cliff notes on the voicemail. I can't turn my phone volume up at the moment.
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Can you post cliff notes on the voicemail. I can't turn my phone volume up at the moment.
"If you mess with me I'll sue you."
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Can you post cliff notes on the voicemail. I can't turn my phone volume up at the moment.
Pretty much what Nat said, Bruce warning Pat that he wasn't a nice guy like Gaspari, and he needs to stop commenting on their products, or he'll sue.
There might've been bad blood before that, as a lot of guys got on Bruce for helping T-Mag come out with Mag 10, etc.... The spray on pro-hormones years before. Kneller was "Brock Strasser" over there.
Edit - Yeah, Pat was one of the main guys calling him out during the T-Mag days years before.
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Sounds as though Pat was not very welcome in the popular kids club of the industry.
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was he saved ?
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Always thought he was a cocky asshole. But it's in poor taste to speak ill of the dead so RIP PATRICK.
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was he saved ?
Doubtful.
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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.
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At least he lifted.
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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.
Mad scientist. He should have charged hundreds of thousands for THG and epitest cream. I'm not a chemist but what Pat was doing wasn't really hard to come up with. He found the THG in Julius Vida's book, where later all the supp companies found the Superdrol and M1T etc, and then he logically understood you needed epitest to keep the test to epitest ratios normal so as to not raise suspicion. Imagine what a state sponsored doping program can do. China, Russia. I can think of a few relatively simple things like new testosterone and GH raising peptides, never mind the theoretical viruses that raise natural IGF-1 etc.
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He changed the game and created a place in the history of this industry for sure. Like Animal with his fina conversation kits and Kneller with his blue print on how to run a steroid mail order business. I am sure there are others that made game changing discoveries too for the rest of us.
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So...he developed various...new "things" that were anabolic, and he used them on himself...and he died in his late 50's...hmmm... mysterious!
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R.I.P., I think he created 1-AD. What was the cause of death?
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R.I.P., I think he created 1-AD. What was the cause of death?
He ruptured a vein in his massive cock and bled out.
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He ruptured a vein in his massive cock and bled out.
Brutal if true
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He ruptured a vein in his massive cock and bled out.
Wow! Very impressive
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So...he developed various...new "things" that were anabolic, and he used them on himself...and he died in his late 50's...hmmm... mysterious!
I think he was a hardcore rec druggie and some of those he developed himself too! So I would lean towards something like that, OD or damage from that, but I don't know obviously. Like I said earlier here his posts on FB looked like he was often in an altered state.
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Was a legend…R.I.P my friend 🫶🏻🙏🏻🕊️
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Fuck. RIP Patrick. I knew of him since I got on the internet and I still occasionally checked up on him to see what was going on with him on FB, just did the other day.
He came across as stupid a lot of times through his FB posts. He seemed to have a lot of problems with drugs and I wondered if he was really altered a lot of the times he posted.
that full stop after "fuck" was probably the most important full stop I have seen in a while
It reads totally differnt without it
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Wasn't he the guy who introduced androstenedione to the supplement market?
That stuff sold like hot cakes in the late 90s, especially the brands from Osmo and MuscleTech. MuscleMag International based their entire publication on this stuff (well that, and silicon-stuffed "fitness" models).
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Wasn't he the guy who introduced androstenedione to the supplement market?
That stuff sold like hot cakes in the late 90s, especially the brands from Osmo and MuscleTech. MuscleMag International based their entire publication on this stuff (well that, and silicon-stuffed "fitness" models).
Yes. Pat wasn't crazy enough to fuck with the Superdols and M1Ts though, while others made a killing. Too lazy to look it up now if the BALCO scandal was before those drugs were sold but he obviously had a target on him. But they were as much steroids as the THG he developed and were all "discovered" from the same book. Wonder how much Gaspari made off the steroids like Halodrol, millions I'm sure. Pat was on gov assistance.
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Yes. Pat wasn't crazy enough to fuck with the Superdols and M1Ts though, while others made a killing. Too lazy to look it up now if the BALCO scandal was before those drugs were sold but he obviously had a target on him. But they were as much steroids as the THG he developed and were all "discovered" from the same book. Wonder how much Gaspari made off the steroids like Halodrol, millions I'm sure. Pat was on gov assistance.
Just out of curiosity, why is DHEA the only pro hormone that didn't get banned? Androstenedione, androstenediol, norandrostenedione, norandrostendiol, etc. all got whacked by the feds.
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Just out of curiosity, why is DHEA the only pro hormone that didn't get banned? Androstenedione, androstenediol, norandrostenedione, norandrostendiol, etc. all got whacked by the feds.
Senator Orrin Hatch (the father of the DSHEA act in America) and the life extension supplement lobby threatened to throw a lot of time and money into fighting the anti-prohormone bills if DHEA wasn't taken off the banned list. Rather than fight Hatch, they took DHEA off the list, citing that it is a very weak precursor with other uses. Hatch went along with the ban after that, and the rest is history.
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Just out of curiosity, why is DHEA the only pro hormone that didn't get banned? Androstenedione, androstenediol, norandrostenedione, norandrostendiol, etc. all got whacked by the feds.
Encyclopedia BB got ythe facts but another interesting thing is that pro-hormone was perhaps not always a very scientific descriptor for those compounds. Those can be called anabolic steroids too and I believe orgs such as WADA list them under AAS. Then with the Superdrol etc the supp industry came up with the absurd descriptor pro-steroid LOL. Some common AAS have active metabolites and could therefore be pro-hormones as well.
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Encyclopedia BB got ythe facts but another interesting thing is that pro-hormone was perhaps not always a very scientific descriptor for those compounds. Those can be called anabolic steroids too and I believe orgs such as WADA list them under AAS. Then with the Superdrol etc the supp industry came up with the absurd descriptor pro-steroid LOL. Some common AAS have active metabolites and could therefore be pro-hormones as well.
Senator Orrin Hatch (the father of the DSHEA act in America) and the life extension supplement lobby threatened to throw a lot of time and money into fighting the anti-prohormone bills if DHEA wasn't taken off the banned list. Rather than fight Hatch, they took DHEA off the list, citing that it is a very weak precursor with other uses. Hatch went along with the ban after that, and the rest is history.
Thank you, Getbig brethren!!!
I remember how well MuscleTech's Anotesten worked back in the day. So, I've tried to replicate, using Tribulus, DHEA, Tongkat Ali (Longjack) in place of androstenedione, and DIM instead of Indole-3-Carbinol.
So far, so good!! It has definitely helped with the strength and recovery (among other things ;D).