This week is Passover so the Jewish tradition is to think about how lucky we are that we aren’t slaves and to try to figure out how to make sure that nobody in the world today or tomorrow is ever a slave again. Part of the solution was listed as Elijah who would arrive at the new world and put everything right. The smart Rabbis made sure that people couldn’t just let the work be done by a Peter Pan figure to solve the worlds problems and made it clear that you need to do the work yourself and not wait for Elijah. Among my favorite quotes from last night’s seder was that one very wise rabbi said – If you are planting a tree and you see Elijah, finish planting the tree. The importance of this philosophy is key, especially to an atheist because the concept is that if you want a better world then don’t look for a God to come and make it for you. Everyone shapes the world we all live in so real action is what makes the world a better place and not asking for a supernatural being to interfere because you behaved properly. The behaving properly is the act of creating the better world.

My father was speaking after the seder about a recent project he has been working on. The background is that an American cyclist was found guilty of blood doping through a new test that detects whether there are blood cells that are foreign to the person being tested in their system. The test came up positive and it cost Tyler Hamilton his career. But before the test was created scientific literature already showed that this test should create false positives because stem cells are often shared in the womb both between a fetus and a mother and between multiple embryos growing in the same womb. These stem cells appeared often enough in studies of fraternal twins that any test that found a foreign blood cell should also make sure it isn’t genetically similar to a mother or fraternal twin with regards to it’s DNA. So he is working with Tyler Hamilton and his legal team to examine the test to determine whether it had found blood doping or a normal human with stem cells from family members from birth.

Now my father is not someone who runs to the rescue of the guilty. In fact his earlier work in genetic testing was in the opposite side. He was an expert witness in both the first DNA evidence trial in the US to prosecute using DNA evidence and also worked on a number of cases afterwards. He is not interested in making money or fame on this case. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a leader in the project to map the human genome, and a very well respected molecular biologist.

So now I have a major problem with the head of WADA (World Anti Doping Association), a man by the name of Dick Pound because his reaction was ignorant and insulting. This is an excerpt from an article written in the LA Times April 17th – titled Hamilton Presses his Case .

‘USADA and its experts assail that theory as nonsense. They say, for instance, that blood banks would be dotted with donations containing "mixed populations" were it true, but they are not. "Maybe he should hire an exorcist," Dick Pound, the head of WADA, said with a laugh in a telephone interview, dismissing the notion of a "vanishing twin."

The problem is that he laughed at what my father proposes that through science is a real possibility and essentially equated the science that my father is doing in the realm of a charlatan exorcist. Unfortunately for Mr. Pound this type of ignorance is a perpetuation of injustice. Even if the test on Tyler Hamilton is somehow proven correct in this case through a private process of judgments the science of the test has major flaws that need to be investigated and false positive risks need to be resolved before using a test that can quickly and erroneously ruin the careers of the athletes being tested.

My only response to this is that I will look to determine who Mr. Pound works for - whether it is a political appointment or if he has a real boss and demand both an apology for the statement and his resignation as the head of WADA. The behavior of dismissing a scientist’s rebuttal of a purportedly scientific testing technique must be done through science and not by laughing at the scientific communities views on the flaws built into the tests. It is the burden of the testing body to respond to intelligent criticisms of the tests in place and if the head of the testing body is not up to the task of working with the scientific community in an intelligent manner then he should be disqualified from holding the position.

My father’s work on this case is important in the tradition of Passover because we Jews believe in the idea along with Oliver Wendell Holmes that it is better to let 100 guilty men go free than to imprison a single innocent man. In other words – You have the most perverse form of justice when the system doesn’t allow innocent people to prove their own innocence.