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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?"
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.
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?
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.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
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.
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...