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Gene Doping: Genetically Engineered Athletes
securitas writes "With the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics about to begin, games officials are on the lookout for the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes who want to gain an edge over their competitors. Scientific American's H. Lee Sweeney reports on sports officials who are looking to the near future with fear, anticipating a new, undetectable kind of doping that threatens to transform the fundamental nature of sports: gene doping (single-page view). The technology uses new 'therapies that give patients a synthetic gene, which can last for years, producing high amounts of naturally occurring muscle-building chemicals. The chemicals are indistinguishable from their natural counterparts and are only generated locally in the muscle tissue .... so officials will have nothing to detect in a blood or urine test.'
The article from the July 2004 issue includes diagrams by Jen Christiansen on the importance of skeletal muscles that provide athletes' power and how gene doping works.
Is the future of competitive sports an elite cadre of genetically engineered athletes?"
There was a story published in Omni magazine in '79 called 'The Mickey Mouse Olympics' by Thomas Sullivan. The Soviet and USA Olympic teams consisted of genetically engineered freaks that the respective teams tried to sneak past the judges. There was a swimmer with a blowhole who didn't have to lift his head out of the water to breathe, a wrestler with alligator skin ('just a really bad case of eczema'), etc.
I heard a feature on this on NPR yesterday, and yes, the scientist they interviewed who was studying this was doing it for exactly this reason.
i am now going to nitpick like a grandma, because thats what slashdotters do.
you are using the term chimera wrong. it is not a chimera. a chimera is technically an organism which possesses a genetic composition from more than one zygote. this athlete in question came from only one zygote, apparently, and only has had some of it's genes modified, therefore gene therapy (using a vector such as retro or adenovirus to deliver a gene) does not make a chimera.
a "mosaic" would be the correct term, which would be an organism that developed from the same zygote but which contains cells that have varying genetic composition.