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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?"
..undetectable, just like EPO was back in the day.
"This explains all of
Although given the comments in the "Total Cost of 0wnership" thread, that was apparently a package deal with the gullibility gene. ;-)
It's things like this that makes the whole notion of "natural" competition absurd. If what are essentially changes to the genes can result in an unfair advantage, then you have already been penalizing people who don't have these genes, and rewarding people who do.
Ideally, olympics should be about who has the most perseverance, dedication, and talent. But this exposes the olympics as essentially rewarding people for having the right genes. Why don't we just examine the genes aka Gattaca and declare the winner beforehand? I realize that reaching a competitive level takes quite a bit of effort, but if genes turn out to be the determining factor, we may as well be just testing DNA.
Somehow, the first thing that comes to my mind is how the gene modding could be used to create ultra-mega-super-models. mmmmmmmmmm, ultra-mega-super-models I suppose the athletes will have to just be honest then. No more "vitamines and nutritional supplaments".
Even now, before this kind of thing is readily available, people pass blood tests and yet get derided as using something that allows to succeed. Lance Armstrong is the classic example - here's a guy who's an amazing athlete, and who has been able to stay on top of his game for longer than anyone else. Makes sense that he would be using drugs, right? Well, he's passed every test he's taken.
In my opinion, he's clean, and is being unfairly accused. But in the future, in 20 years, will there be another Lance Armstrong who refuses to take performance enhancing drugs but yet surpasses all of his or her opponents? What will happen to him or her if s/he is accused of gene therapy? What will happen to the incredibly successful athletes who also happen to be honest?
...look like a statistical blip. Once prospective parents can replace defective genes and "improve" existing ones, we'll have medical ethicists and philosophers agonizing over what it means to be human -- to no avail, since the revolution will sweep them aside before they can come to a conclusion.
Forget the atomic bomb -- if a totalitarian country like North Korea starts fiddling with the genome, the rest of the world will have to follow suit or risk being turned into an irrelevancy. In one hundred years, we'll look on unaltered humans the same way we view the Amish or Bush people today.
/ not saying it's good or bad, it just is.
My guess is a couple decades later _everyone_ will want to be enhanced for the health benefits of being able to create a physicall fit person, possibly avoiding the problems with obesity that are afflicting a large part of the population.
Genetic musclular/coordination potential, as determined by ones genetic composition, is only one part of what makes a champion. The other factors, training, coaching and drilling on technique, mental toughness (How nutured/mentored), opportunity and desire also contribute. Some of these are totaly random but all contribute to the outcome. Fail to have anyone of them, and even if you have a superior gene map, you won't win.
If you can't detect it, it should be legal.
Caveat; If you die of 'natural' causes within 5 years after winning the games, ya gotta give the gold back. Fair? Fair!
Like lots of people on this board, I think the whole idea of 'natural' vs. 'unnatural' competition is a little odd. Why is someone who 'naturally' produces more testosterone more ethical than someone who injects it? Shoud certain hormones be restricted to a normal range? Or do we just say 'its gotta be organic.'
Probably at the heart of all this is the question "what's the Olympics about, exactly?"
Doing as well as you can? Testing the limits of human endurance? Then allow modifications.
Overcoming disability? Lets penalize those folks with fewer disabilites, then!
The problem with technology is that it blurs natural boundaries and makes us ask silly philosophical questions like "what does a person have to do to qualify as a human."
The original olympics wasn't about all of this silly ethical garbage. It was about muscular naked men manhandling one another in front of a large audience. I, for one, think we should honor this spirit and seek to preserve it.
Amen.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
In sports there are strict rules which are crucial to maintaining the integrity of the sport and fairplay. While calling drug prohibition amongst athletes fascist may well be idealogically correct, the same logic could be applied to any rule in the game. In short, all rules are in some manner fascist.
The inevitable outcome here will be the diversification of sports into "pure" and "modified" categories.
Will we restrict games to only people who haven't had their genes tampered with and those who are chip-free.
I suspect in that future time sports fans will look back on our current unenhanced sports period the same way we look back on 19th Century sports: with some nostalgia, but shaking our heads at the quaint rules and customs.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
"Ideally, olympics should be about who has the most perseverance, dedication, and talent."
exept the problem with this is that perseverance, dedication and talent are genetic traits just like strength....what if an athlete didn't use the mussle building gene but she did use a gene that makes her procrastinate less....or in some other way helps with the mental part of training.
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And don't imagine its just an issue of personal choice. That it is not is perfectly clear in team sports where players are asked to "take one for the team" but even in individual sports the pressures to perform make it very hard for individuals to make informed choices.
In an individual sport like Tennis, for example, the pressure causes lots of good teenagers burn out from trying to meet parental and other expectations even (presumably) without taking performance drugs. The pressure is very real even when not deliberately applied.
Given this, all sports association have a moral duty to try to prevent use of such drugs. To do otherwise is to recklessly endanger the children taking up your sport.
Squirrel!
Obligatory All Drug Olympics reference!
The fact is most people don't want to watch sports that require destroying your body to win. They want to see a competition of discipline, determination, and - yes - good genes, not a freak show of folks willing to half their lifespan in order to win.
But what about cross-breeding athletes ?
Natural "genetic engineering" won't be outlawed and if artificial genetic engineering becomes an acceptable way of curing/preventing some diseases, it'll be hard to deny athletes access to such medicine...
Oh, and what about athletes using contact lenses? Or shoes? I suspect the organisation wouldn't let an all-natural athlete enter the competition because of nudity
Some people act like nobody will know they copied and pasted.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
You're posing a lot of the same questions a lot of other people have re: Armstrong and his comeback from cancer.
The thing is, before Armstrong had cancer, his body type was radically different -- broader shoulders, heavier upper body. Chemo destroyed most of his muscle mass, and as a result, when he rebuilt himself, he was able to focus on the muscle groups necessary to win Tours de France. Look at him now and he's got a scrawny upper body compared to the past. That translates into a HUGE advantage in the hills.
That said, the hormonal/chemical balance in his body would be very unlikely to be beneficial in this case. The man had cancer, which is not a favorable mutation. And chemo? It's poisonous, that's why it works. It's not mutagenic and isn't likely to have fuxored with his hormones/body chemistry. Armstrong was a genetic freak before cancer and was a very good bicycle racer before cancer -- he just made the most of a very bad situation and turned it into a huge positive. Cancer gave him a few advantages: he was able to rebuild himself to be more suited toward events like the Tour de France, he learned to endure horrible hardships and pain, and he learned the value of hard work.
That said, as an amateur cyclist, where can I get the LanceArmstrongGeneModPak(TM)?
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Part of the question is 'where do we draw the line?'
Should we forbid eyeglasses? Contact lenses? Laser eye surgery? What about laser eye surgery to take someone from 20/20 vision to 20/10?
We have been using vision correction for hundreds of years, so somehow, we generally view that as "fair". But is it?
I don't have the answers. Argueably, no two athletic competetors are on equal ground except for identical twins/triplets/clones.
(For the record, I am very nearsighted -- anything beyond about 8 inches from my nose is blurry without my glasses.)
To a large extent, that is what happened. He used to be a triathlete, and had a strong upper body that was good for swimming but mostly dead weight on the bike. When chemotherapy stripped him down to his bones, he built himself back up as a pure cyclist.
Also, while a lot of the European cycling fans and journalists grumble that Lance never shows visible pain during races and is therefore less likable -- if you've seen the clips of him riding just after getting out of chemo, bald, with a hole cut in his skull, you get the impression that he's simply redefined his whole scale of what real suffering is.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
We already have different classes of athletes. Look at the special olympics. Different types of handicaps qualify you for different levels of competion. Now they just need to expand it to encompass all people, not just the below average ones.
There isn't much point in competition with regular athletes either. People find it entertaining. If people like watching enhanced athletes competing, what is the difference?
I've got a mind like a steel trap - it's got an animal's foot stuck in it.