Amgen - EPO: wheels within wheels

This is sooo ironic Alanis Morissette could write a song about it!

Organizers of the Tour of California, the US’s most important professional cycling event, who boasted after last year’s race that no riders tested positive for banned substances, have now acknowledged that riders were not tested for what has become the sport’s most abused drug — the blood booster known as EPO.

That failure is more surprising because the lead sponsor of the Tour of California is Amgen, the California biotechnology company that produces the genetically engineered version of EPO, which is sold primarily to help cancer and dialysis patients battle anemia.

More at the NYT

And while we are on the subject of irony. Some might say that what Ms Morissette is describing in her song is more unfortunate happenstance than ironic in nature.

So.

Here's Alanis' lyrics with "added extra" irony:

An old man turned ninety-eight. He won the lottery and died the next day... of chronic emphysema from inhalation of the latex particles scratched off decades' worth of lottery tickets.

A black fly in your Chardonnay... poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France.

A death row pardon two minutes too late... because the governor was too busy watching Dead Man Walking to grant clemency any earlier.

Rain on your wedding day... to Ra, the Egyptian sun-god.A free ride when you've already paid... all of your money to the good-natured cab driver when you mistook him for a mugger.

The good advice that you just didn't take... after reading Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking and resolving that the key to success is making your own decisions.

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