Angliru said:
Judging from the article the scientist is saying that it is an invitation to dope from a young age to set one's personal testing parameters prior to the initial test as normal for them (while they're juiced) and to maintain being juiced throughout their career to maintain that level of supposed normalcy.
Some riders might try that. But remember, the passport is a range with both an upper and a lower limit. If you establish your baseline while juiced--say, with a higher than natural HT--you must stay juiced whenever you're tested, or you risk failing (if your HT is lower than the baseline, that will raise a red flag; you might argue you're sick, but then, riders with higher than normal parameters may also argue that).
The nature of blood transfusions is that you can't do them all the time. You do them in advance of important races, and maybe sometimes in training, but most of the time a doper is going to have natural blood values, determined by genetics and to some extent by training. He will spend much more time in that condition than in a freshly-transfused condition, which means he is much more likely to be tested in that state.
I think, like JZ, that the passport has been successful at limiting doping (as did the 50% HT limit). It probably decreases the likelihood of doping to an extent that endangers health, and it may also reduce the performance benefits that doped riders have over clean ones. The problem is, if word gets around that a rider has no chance of being busted for failing the passport, riders will naturally be tempted to push the limits.
In retrospect, it might have been better not to try to sanction riders with questionable parameters, but simply tell them that their values are suspicious, and they will be watched closely. That won't stop doping, but it could limit it.
Remember that unknown rider who claimed Contador doped after the Dauphine. He implied that 150 ml. of blood was transfused (packed cells, so perhaps equivalent to 300 ml. of whole blood). That is significantly less than the unit (450 ml.) of blood that riders were thought to transfuse in the past. Likewise, of course, EPO testing has resulted in micro-dosing. The doping goes on, but at lower levels. As long as riders feel no one is doping any more than they are, they may be able to live with these narrower limits. They always claim they dope because everyone else does; to the extent that's true, narrower limits won't bother them if they're sure everyone has to work within those limits.