Slashdot Mirror
Genetically-Engineered Super-Athletes?
Karma 50 writes: "The BBC News is reporting that
genetically modified "super-athletes" may be competing as soon as the 2012 Olympic games. A conference in London warns that gene therapies for diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis may be used by athletes to enhance performance. So far, this is undetectable. So we're not immediately facing the prospect of watching athletes bred especially for their performance but, with our desire to win at all costs, this too can't be far off."
... how long until our planet is graced with Genetically-Engineered Super-Models?
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
How can we be sure that genetic advantages are from cheating (i.e. artificially engineering the DNA to improve the athletic ability of a competitor), and not simply down to a lucky combination of gametes?
... how closely reality follows science fiction.
Think about it. Nation 1's athlete gets beaten by Nation 2's genetically-engineered athlete at the Olympics. Nation 1 realizes the same thing could happen with genetically-engineered soldiers on the battlefield.
Say it with me, now... Eugenics Wars.
11 years old, assuming a newborn started the therapy now, is about right for genetically engineered female gymnasts, swimmers, and figure skaters? It may take another couple of years for genetically modified athletes to appear in men's sports.
My biggest problem with this isn't the modification in itself; who wouldn't want to be smarter, better looking, faster, stronger, with perfect eyesight and hearing, and the ability to first post at will? It's just that I doubt there will ever be free will to choose to get genetic modifications. It's hard to carefully weigh the consequences of a genetic therapy when you are 3 months old (or still in utero, for that matter.)
On the other hand, how many 13 y.o. gymnasts really had the free choice about whether to compete or not, anyway...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
As long as the modifications are equivalent across all the athletes competing in a given sport, won't this just make it all the more exciting for the viewer?
Mind you... faster isn't necessarily better, as shown by Formula One
Maybe I'm just being obtuse, but I have some questions:
It's already a technology game. Of course, we don't look at training methodologies as technology, but it is. We have been developing better and better training techniques over the years, which has been showing up as better and better sports performance.
It's already about genetic advantage. Certain people are born with better genes for sports competition. Gene therapy just levels the playing field. Heck, it also relieves the pressure from parents who want to improve their child in the womb -- they can just wait until the kid is born, who can then choose their genetic attributes themselves :-).
I think the real issue here is that people believe that sports competition is something noble. Certainly, this is how the multi-billion $$$ Olympics.com sports corporation markets it. I just don't see it that way. I'm not saying its ignoble, its just that the NobleAthlete(tm) is a product. E.g. in the past, only "amateurs" could compete in order to maintain this mythical image, but now professional athletes can compete -- pros were allowed only when it didn't weaken the image the Olympics.com is trying to sell.
The reason why this will eventually be accepted (assuming there is no serious risk to the athlete of course) is simple - sporting events are entertainment. If records are never broken, nobody cares. In 1997, baseball was no big deal. In 1998, there was a huge peak in interest because a record that had stood for decades was about to be broken. However, frequent record breaking is just as boring as no record breaking at all, as was shown by the general lack of interest in the last weekend of the 2001 MLB season, which featured all kinds of records falling. What does this mean about the future of genetically enhanced sports? At first, people will be amazed at the superhuman feats. Then it will get boring. Finally, it will be interesting again, if anyone still cares about sports enough to participate at the media-hyped level.
I agree, if...
Always an if there isn't it? Well, my only concern is the possible harm for humanity. The more individuals we get with the same genes, the more likly they are to be wiped out, and "traditional" steroids (etc) have a tendecy to make the user aggresive, or degenerate the body in the long run.
So, as long as I won't suffer from it, let them have cloned teams and altered people. Maybe we can stop the madness that is cosmic surgery today as well.
I'm not sure exactly how many generations American slavery went on for, but I'm not entirely convinced that selective breeding, if done haphazardly for 20 or so generations (here we cannot assume a rigorous, scientifically based and centrally organized program) could produce a group of people who were significantly stronger/hardier than average. After all, when your slaves work hard every day, how do you determine how much of their muscularity is due to genetics, and how much is due to you making them carry heavy things for 16 hours a day? This sort of nature/nurture contribution to phenotype (that means the person's traits) is hard to determine even by modern bio-statistical methods. I doubt some family of slave-owning assh*oles could do it effectively enough to make a difference. I would argue that the abundance of elite black athletes might point more to a legacy of discrimination in other fields of life which might encourage more black people with potential to enter professional sports.
WRT your comments about the Daschund and Chihuahua breeds of dogs, they weren't bred that way to look preposterous. A Daschund is ideally suited to running down narrow burrows to hunt rabbits (I think that's what they were bred to go for). A Chihuahua, well I don't know but somebody had an idea. Maybe they were bred to kill rats.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I'm engineered in such a way that my cells divide and grow and make me larger and stronger. I was so cleverly engineered that if you cut me the damage repairs itself over time... also I have a system by which I can fuel myself, and a means of distribution for that fuel throughout my body...
Isn't science wonderful...?
As opposed to which pursuits that aren't pointless. Overall nothing has a point so why crack on athletics?
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
These mutants are already out there - try watching ESPN2's "World's Strongest Man Competitions" and you'll see what I mean.
Absolute brutes - they probably were born that way and exercise/steroids did the rest.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
-- Dan
I've been waiting for this for years.
What I would like to see is 2 separate parallel olympics:
SuperOlympics
Take all the drugs you want, upgrade your genes, add some cyborg parts, and do the 100 meter dash flat under 4 seconds. (I would love to see a marathonian on coke!)
NormalOlympics
Just like they are now, no drugs, no gene therapy, no implants, BUT with snipers! If you fail a drug test, they don't tell you, you get shot in mid-race!
Now THAT I would watch!
You can't take the sky from me...
We already draw artifical lines between what is acceptable and what is not in athletics training. The common thread in banned supplements is that they are deemed hazardous to the athlete's health. Would gene therapy have significant harmful side effects ? If not, there is no reason to ban it.
Creatine is legal, anabolic steroids are illegal, and androstenedione was illegal in some sports but legal in others (although baseball later banned it).
Science will continue to come up with performance enhancing methods faster than tests can be produced to detect their use. If this does give people an edge, it will be used whether it is legal or not.
Or, people who can tear their tendons out of their bones...
Yes, certain genetic enhancements, such as higher RBC count, can be done without (i assume) much damage to the body.
However, there are limits to other enhancements. The human body has had millions of years to become somewhat optimized. When you start increasing certain aspects with disregard for others, you create problems.
Just building muscle mass on power weight lifters won't matter much unless you also increase the strength of all the supporting structures. Yes, you could pretty easily increase muscle mass/density to lift an extra 200kg. But how much more weight can the wrist take before snapping? The small bones of the feet?
Sprinters- just how much stress can you put on your feet when you start? Sure, tweaking those leg muscles so they can pump faster will help, but the start is the most critical part of a sprint. Gene therapy to build stronger bones and tendons in the feet so that it can withstand more pressure at the starting point would be key to winning races. IIRC, the foot can withstand 20G's or so. Well, if you could double it, then the sprinters would be able to get off the line that much quicker.
Perhaps that's where the competition will be. How far can you push the body, during competition, without breaking. Sorta like the drag races of today- the cars that win are the ones that are the best, but most importantly, don't blow headers and gaskets coming off the line.
We'll start watching the olympics for the same reasons we watch the nascar races; for the crashes.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
> Personally, I'd rather we stopped even pretending to disapprove of drug use, ;-)
> and say that you can do anything you like to yourself before or during the
> competition, but you'll compete in issue equipment, or naked. Hey, it was good
> enough for the Greeks.
Yeah. ALL the athletes who enter into the Olympics and other big competitions have decided to give up on a "normal" lifestyle. From a very young age they train, train, train and train and do very little else. They either do it out of their own free will, or ignore free will long enough to win big.
Super-elite drugged up, surgically enhanced, genetically modified or engineered athletes would be the next logical step, where people are either born for the express purpose of providing us with amusement, or forced by their families or governments from a very young age to do the same. What exactly is the big problem with letting people decide for themselves to get totally messed up on steroids, let alone genetic modification?
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
I've read several comments on slashdot, and gotten the impression that some people think such gene therapy would be "unfair" to those athletes who didn't use it, if they had to compete against those who did.
This is nonsense.
Really, all gene therapy does is alter someone's natural talent. No one really "deserves" what natural talent they have anyways. Did Einstein or Hawking "deserve" to be brilliant? Did Michael Jordan "deserve" to be gifted with natural athletic talent. The answer to these questions is, of course, a resounding no.
No one deserves what natural talents they have or do not have.
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social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
So we're not immediately facing the prospect of watching athletes bred especially for their performance but, with our desire to win at all costs, this too can't be far off.
WHAT?
Athletes have been "breeding for athletic performance" for thousands of years! That's what it's ABOUT!
Haven't you noticed, even now, that the Jocks get the Cheerleaders, along with their pick of the female fans? Cheerleaders who are themselves athletic and exhibiting all the characteristics of healthy and extremely fertile young women just hiting breeding age? And Olympic Jockettes get to pick among several healthy multimillionaires, if they don't pair off with a prime Olympic Jock?
The only thing different here is that technology can now meddle directly in the process to direct and accelerate it by selecting particular genes or adding new ones from outside, rather than leaving it to the luck of the genetic draw among the genes currently in the particular Jocks and Jockettes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The problem, as you well know, is that it screws people up, and often they're not given a choice.
Right. We can address that in two ways:
Our competitiveness isn't going to go away, and banning all use of enhancements is delusional. Let's get enhancement of athletes out in the open, study and understand the effects, and allow governing bodies to make rational decisions about marginalising extreme examples of abuse. Banning everything will just encourage trainers to use everything, on the basis that you may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.