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John Ziegler Bodybuilding Biography
Dr. John Ziegler Steroids and Bodybuilding
Dr. John Ziegler was born in 1920 in the Pennsylvania USA and later graduated from Gettysburg College in 1942. His father and his grandfather were not only practicing physicians but were also scientists that discovered the salt tablet amongst other innovations.John was an officer in the United States Marine Corps and he saw a lot of action in the Pacific during World War II. He suffered multiple and extensive bullet wounds. It was his surgery and his recovery from his wounds that led him into the speciality of recuperative medicine, which he studied at the University of Maryland Medical School.
After serving his internship in Norfolk Virginia he then did neurology at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. In 1954 he finally settled in Olney, Maryland where he specialized in treating seriously injured patients while also conducting chemistry research at Ciba Pharmaceuticals.
John became a keen weightlifter at the then very popular York Barbell Club owned by Bob Hoffman. He quickly became friends with John Grimek who was employed by Bob Hoffman as an editor of two of his popular magazines.
It was in October 1954 when John went to Vienna travelling as the resident doctor for the American weightlifting team that he met other Russian physicists. They kept asking him what "drugs" he was giving the American team to improve their performance, which is when he realised the truth about competing in sport.
The Russians physician taking care of the team openly admitted to giving them testosterone. It was a complete enlightenment for John who immediately started testing the dosages of testosterone to get the best results.
Although the three bodybuilders and weightlifters that he did tests on all produced good results there were severe side effects. John continued with experimentation until he finally created methandrostenolone, which was produced by Ciba for the first time in 1958 and given the trade name Dianabol or DBOL.
At the Olympic games in 1960 all the weightlifters were given Dianabol but the improvement was negligible which John immediately blamed on the misuse of the steroid when he learned that some athletes had taken 20 times the dose that he had recommended.
The result was severe and often irreparable liver and kidney damage and John was quoted as saying "I lost interest in fooling with IQ's of that caliber. Now it's about as widespread among these idiots as marijuana, I wish to God now I'd never done it. I'd like to go back and take that whole chapter out of my life."
It is interesting to note that John died in 1983 from heart failure, which he said was the permanent damage that he had given to himself when experimenting with testosterone and other performance enhancing drugs.
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