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?"

Comments

Cybernectics and sports

[jinxidoru]

I was speaking with a friend the other day about doping and the olympics. We started talking about the effect cybernectics and genetic engineering will have to the future of the olympics and all sports for that example. Eventually, when cybernectics are more common and people starting embedding electronics in themselves, what will we do? Will we restrict games to only people who haven't had their genes tampered with and those who are chip-free. Or will we just get tired of watching normal sports because Unreal Tournament has become a live person event?

Re:Cybernectics and sports

[bs_testability]

Why restrict olympic games at all?
There's no significant difference between gene tampering, doping, and selective breeding.
It's not like keeping it natural is going to make it so that almost anyone could get there if they only tried hard enough.
To make the games interesting the contestants should be chosen at random from the general population.
Rather than determining if our best is better than their best we could try to determine if our average Joe is better than theirs...

Re:Cybernectics and sports

[jdray]

I was almost onboard with that argument until my wife pointed out that, if you let this sort of thing go, then pretty soon athletes will be expected to dope up to make the team. That's one thing in professional sports, which is commercial and the athletes get paid to risk themselves. But it wouldn't be long before it got into college sports, then high school. There's too much opportunity for kids to make bad decisions, the effects of which might not show up for twenty or more years, on the premise that they want to impress their coach so he'll put them into Varsity league in their freshman year.

Now, I'm not saying that we should ban the practice all together. For instance, I'm nearly 40 years old, I'm never going to be a pro athlete, and I'm in fairly typical shape for your average cube dweller (not overweight, but not exactly fit, either). Much like many of you, I didn't grow up with that genetic string that allowed me to grow muscles just by thinking about it, as all the meatheads in high school seemed to do. I wouldn't mind having a little doping treatment that would add 20% to mass and strength in the short term, so long as the risk to my long term health was minimal.

Ironic when you consider the ethos of the original

[GuyFawkes]

...olympic games, which was pretty much anything goes and to the winner go the spoils.....

Strength

[Klar]

I wonder how long until suppression of the myostatin protein becomes a viable way to increase olympic potential. If they made drugs that did this, could they even stop people who took them, cause they could clame that they had a mutation and it was natural?

Use in MD?

[White Roses]

Could the same "gene-doping" be used to combat muscular dystrophy? Sounds like this may have more than one use. Like steroids.

Re:Use in MD?

[KefabiMe]

The MDA (Muscular Dystrophy Association) has been doing a lot of research on using gene therapy for MD. (I only know this because one of my best friends was told when he was 12 that he'll prolly not live past 16 years of age. He made it to 18 before his body gave out.)

It's been a number of years since I've read anything about it, but last I remember there were two issues with using gene therapy to treat MD.

1. The gene needed to counter-act MD is pretty big. It is hard to fit the necessary genetic code into a virus. (If you don't know, viruses are the easiest way to insert genetic code into a person)
2. The second issue is that many people can get sick from the type of virus used to deliver the genetic payload. The viruses aren't bad for the body, but the immune system cannot tell the difference between a good human-engineered virus, and a bad disease causing virus. What this means is that gene therapy is best for people who are not in the later stages of MD (ie, people who can still walk).

As I said, it's been a while since I read any recent research to treating MD, so I would definately appreciate it if someone knowledgeable could provide more information.

Proposal: Two sets of Athletic competitions

[ron_ivi]

It'd be interesting if there were two sets of contests: One for 'natural' and one for 'enhanced' athletes.

I think it would be a great benefit for society, because then the legalized genetic enhancements would become a highly lucrative legimate business that does controlled experiments only on willing participants. What better way of advancing biotech, growth hormone therepies, genetic engineering techniques than funding it with huge sports franchises and only using them on people who want to be using them.

Why not allow these drugs?

[Dan Hayes]

The body itself is full of "performance enhancing drugs" which we use whenever we are in a situation requiring above-normal abilities. Genetic differences will undoubtedly mean that different people will be able to utilise these chemicals to different amounts (and that's ignoring things like lung capacity and so on that are also genetic). So already certain people have a greater ability to compete in athletic events - there is no such thing as a truly level playing field!

So what are performance enhancing drugs if not an extension of this? If an athlete drinks isotonic energy drinks to help them train, why not let them take a chemical to allow them to go that little bit further whilst in action? Is there a difference? Only in the modern fascist paradigm in which drugs are somehow dirty and bad, rather than tools which we use to alter our minds and bodies.

The anti-drug stance of the IOC and other bodies is pure fascism, and doomed to failure. As long as there is competition people will take performance enhancing drugs.

Seems very detectable to me

[G4from128k]

I doubt that gene doping does a good job of inserting exactly one copy of the foreign gene in all cells of an athletes' body. Doing a genetic tests of a sample of cells and discovering that only x% (where X is not near 0% or near 100%) would show that the athlete is a chimera. A bit more study would then prove that the individual is not a naturally occurring in utero chimera, and thus must be an artificially created one. And if the tests show multiple copies of the gene in some cells, then that cinches the finding of being a GMA (genetically modified athlete). The only issue is cost, which might be a bit steep at first.

"Threatens to transform?"

[pclminion]

I always take issue with that phrase. Why is transformation necessarily a "threat?"

Wake up. As our technology advances, life is going to change, sometimes in increments that are uncomfortable to bear. Debates of morality and ethics will constantly shift and evolve. And guess what -- none of this is a "threat."

what is the differance??

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is the future of competitive sports an elite cadre of genetically engineered athletes?"

Isn't the present and past of competitive sports an elite cadre of genetically engineered athletes???

I mean why is genetic engineering though evolution better then consciouse design??

stendec@gmail.com

Am I alone in not giving a damn

[SmallFurryCreature]

The entire idea of the olympics is a joke anyway. Peace and mutual understanding through sports? HA. Yeah then please explain to me why each countries media only focusses on their own athletes and on how many medals they will win. It is just a giant ego contest.

Then you got tiny countries competing with giants, some of who can afford to spend huge sums of money on training and some who can't. Add events that some countries just can't train, bit hard to learn to sail in a landlocked desert, and what is the point.

Open up the drugs and lets see what we can do to the human body eh? Doctors have to be very carefull in human testing of new drugs but here you got a bunch of idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hvolunteers who happily pump themselves full of the latest medicine. Most of these performance enhancing drugs can be used in real medicine.

Lets try muscle building medicine in those without social value ehm, in athletes and if it works we can use it in people struck with disease.

The games ain't fair anyway, if they are all pumped up at least that bit balances out.

Oh. Great.

[Hadriven]

I do hope people at the Olympic Commitee realize that their games are slowly shifting from sport to engineering?

The question is, once the Olympic Games, as well as a whole other lot of various sports - look at the Tour de France - become a dangerous arena where everything, legal or not, is done to upgrade the athletes to a victory which is the only, absolute goal since we've come to entertain a deeply sick fetishism for any kind of winner, no matter if it was in a fair competition and if he/she deserved it, once sports in general, and the Olympic Games in particular become the field of a elite crew of genetically engineered humans, what will then be the point for such games? Aren't sports from the Olympic perspective a way of celebrating and uniting humanity in competitions that are meant to be fair?
If the athletes become better than normal human beings, not because of training but because of biological engineering, will humanity still identify itself to its champions who would have unnaturally bulky muscles, a blood that could carry insane amounts of oxygen and tightly-controlled metabolisms?
How would these athletes be different from machines, engineered with a precise purpose - and discarded, left out to die afterwards (damn, look at what happened to Marco Pantani)...

Worshipping winners instead of reverring competition in itself is having us slide along a slippery and very dangerous slope, IMO.
At least, if those victory-obsessed were tinkering with cybernetic bodies or something close - replaceable, tweakable at will... But no, they're playing with their own lives. All that for a victory which means nothing but insane amounts of money.

- Hadriven

Trials in Humans Without MD

[ZackSchil]

Maybe I'm just dreaming here, but if this drug turns out not to encourage the growth of cancer cells (currently the main concern and only known side effect), I think it could seriously improve the quality of life of the average person. People don't exercise because it's hard. It's hard because people don't exercise. Quite an unhealthy cycle. However, this treatment, while immensely promising for muscle degenerative diseases, could really help overweight people break their unhealthy cycle.

I'll go out and say it: I'm overweight. And yes, it is my fault. I could get out and exercise a ton, I could eat less, etc, but I find the struggle unrewarding and difficult. In the month of July, I spent most of the month creating a 3D game with another guy my age. He had an average build. As an experiment on top of our research, we decided to try something. He didn't believe me that my being overweight was not a result of my eating more and exercising less than he did. So we equalized our days. We ate all meals together and ate items of equal nutritional value. We also followed identical exercise routines (I can run a few miles no problem, I just don't seem to lose weight unless I run them every day while starving myself). By the end of 3 and a half weeks, I had GAINED 10 pounds and he stayed the same. He was shocked. I was not amused. The routine we settled on was probably was less active than what I do normally to maintain.

I don't want to say I have a slow metabolism or any of those other shitty fat people excuses but I can't help but feel like I was dealt a poor hand by genetics. Muscle is expensive for the body to maintain. If I could have more muscle and have it break down less quickly, it could just help my body eat away at my apparently conserved energy being stored as fat. At the same time, it would make exercising easier by increasing my strength by a third or so. I know I'm interested.

Re:Trials in Humans Without MD

[Kaa]

However, this treatment, while immensely promising for muscle degenerative diseases, could really help overweight people break their unhealthy cycle.

Umm... how exactly a lot of muscle mass will help overweight people?

People, generally speaking, get overweight because of problems with their metabolism, problems with their hungry/satiated signals that the body sends to the brain, or psychological problems. None of these problems will be helped by growing more muscles.

I don't want to say I have a slow metabolism or any of those other shitty fat people excuses

People DO have very different metabolisms -- your experiment with your friend showed that quite nicely, by the way.

However slow metabolism != must be overweight. All it means is that you should eat less than "average" people.

If I could have more muscle and have it break down less quickly, it could just help my body eat away at my apparently conserved energy being stored as fat.

No. You would just eat more to maintain that muscle.

In order to lose weight you must eat less. That's it. It is really, really simple. Forget about metabolism, muscle mass, etc. etc. Just eat less.

At the same time, it would make exercising easier by increasing my strength by a third or so.

LOL. It would not make exercising easier. It would just make you buy heavier barbells or increase the resistance on the gym machine :-)

Re:Trials in Humans Without MD

[Believe]

Umm... how exactly a lot of muscle mass will help overweight people?
Well, having more muscle mass is the best way to increase your metabolism. Muscle burns more calories than fat at rest, so having more muscle == speeding up metabolism.

In order to lose weight you must eat less. That's it. It is really, really simple. Forget about metabolism, muscle mass, etc. etc. Just eat less.
Close, but not quite. You must eat less calories than you burn, which means increasing muscle mass and keeping the amount of food you eat the same WILL help you lose weight. The parent poster had it right on all counts where you challenge him. sorry :(

Re:Trials in Humans Without MD

[Kombat]

Umm... how exactly a [will] lot of muscle mass help overweight people?

People, generally speaking, get overweight because of problems with their metabolism, [...]. None of these problems will be helped by growing more muscles.

Actually, if you do a little research about weight gain, muscle training, and fat burning, you'll learn that increased muscle mass actually results in an increased metabolism, which burns fat. Muscle is "metabolically active," which means it is burning calories even when you're not using them. If you're just sitting there, you're muscles are still burning calories. So the more muscles you have, the faster your body's metabolism becomes, and thus, you burn more fat, even without trying.

Lance Armstrong, cancer, rehabilitation, speculati

[Animaether]

It's funny that you bring up Lance Armstrong - no doubt a great athlete, and a man of strong character yet abysmal public relations - as there is some speculation as to his performance and how it might relate to :
- his having had cancer
- his fighting cancer
- his rehabilituation after the cancer

I don't know the facts, so this is entirely speculation based on what other people have said - so don't take this as fact, accusation, or anything else, please - it'll lead up to a more generic question ;)

What if his having had cancer weakened his body quite a bit.
And when he started rehabilitation, he did it with one goal - to cycle once more, and be the best at it that he could be.
Then his body would be trained specifically for, and 're-developed' for, this one goal - cycling.
This as opposed to other cyclers whose bodies 'developed' for everything from crawling, to walking, running, doing the dishes to name something silly - and only later in life, started developing the muscle, endurance, etc. for cycling.

What if this starting out with training the body for the primary goal of cycling gives him the edge ?

Alternatively....what if the cancer, or the treatment, did something to his hormones / body's chemical balance, and thus gives him a sort of 'natural' doping ?

And now for the more generic question...
What if we can actually tell this has happened to a person - that their body has developed into something that it wouldn't normally develop into (call it a mutation, or just an 'abnormal development', or whatever) ?

Would we then ban these individuals from participating in sports ?

Would we create special sports events just for them ? ( much like the Paralympics, and the Special Olympics )

Why bother? Human growth hormone

[stratjakt]

They cant prove if you've injected it artificially, or if it's a natural disorder.

Andre the Giant had it, people who suffer from it get those facial features, pronounced brow and nose, etc.

I watched some documentary about it, they showed lots of photos of russian athletes from the cold war era, most of whom shared striking facial similarities with Andre. Beating americans at all costs was the mantra of the Soviet athletic program.

In soviet russia, hormones produce you!

Who cares about the olympics anyways. The IOC is so frigging corrupt it's a joke. They openly accept bribes (hell, demand them!) when chosing cities to host the games.

Its all a corporate jack-fest, like so much these days. McDonalds, the official hamburger of the american olympic team. Come on, how many finely tuned athletes eat Big Macs on a regular basis?

As long as they're 31173, no one cares.

[bastard42]

Is the future of competitive sports an elite cadre of genetically engineered athletes?

How is this different than now? If everyone uses this, then there is a "level playing field", right? If we're ready to engineer our food, then we should engineer our bodies. You are what you eat.

--or--

I hope so, but only if they go against robots at least half the time.

--or--

Aren't they supposed to be amateurs anyways? Perhaps that's the problem.

Re:Ironic when you consider the ethos of the origi

[ViolentGreen]

Actually, in the original olympics, all forms of magic were band. Whether they be charms of "potions."

Atheletes aren't the only ones

[Believe]

This is a site for news for nerds and I'm way more interested in when genetic engineering will allow us to overclock our brains. This interesting tidbit was on CNN yesterday about how blocking dopamine receptors in monkey's turned them from procrastinators into workaholics. I personally would be very interested in taking a pill that made me sit my ass down and do work instead of posting to slashdot.

On a similar note, when I was at MIT there were a number of people (predominantly course 7 and 18 majors for some reason) who took ritalin or aderall to help them stay up all night and be super focused on work. There was no sort of outrage around campus for that though, much more of a "hey, that's a great idea! Where can I get some?" You can definitely make identical arguments about "fair play" with this type of doping too, but I never agreed with the naysayers. If I want to be an elite thinker and knowledge worker, why shouldn't I do whatever I can to acheive that? If sometime in the future scientists could get a genetic modification which raised their IQs by 30 points, wouldn't we want that? It seems to me that the only reason there's an uproar about atheletes doping themselves up is because all of atheletics is truly and fundamentally about unimportant little games. If cancer researchers boosted their brainpower they'd be lauded for making a "sacrifice" in the name of the common good.

Split the games.

[Bahumat]

Seriously. I think the time has already come where the Olympic games should be split into two categories. To use an automotive analogy, Stock and Modified.

Let the people who want to compete honest and clean do so, and give the people who want to showcase what modern technology can do for their bodies do so as well.

Those who want to burn themselves out in five years of drug-fuelled performance can then have their venue to do so. Companies wishing to showcase biological enhancements via gene doping, or cybernetics, or whatever the world's tech level has to offer, can then do so.

Is there a moral cost to this? Sure. Plenty will end up dead or crippled from their reliance on drugs/gene tech/cybernetics/what-have-you. Will it stop cheating in the 'Stock' Olympic games? No, but at least those drawn to "performance at any cost" will have a better venue to perform in.

Personally I'm excited about the idea of spending an hour or two watching genetically modified humans fly at twice the speed of an average sprinter around a racetrack, and then spend the rest of the day watching good old fashioned Human 1.0's compete amongst themselves.

Bring it on, IOC. If you don't, someone else eventually will, and steal your thunder in the process!

What a weird, fucked up world...

[pclminion]

We live in a world where it's acceptable to invest a million dollars into extremely detailed computer simulations of the aerodynamics of a particular kind of sprinting shoe in order to shave a hundredth of a second off somebody's time on the 400 meters. Where it's allowable to put an athlete on a treadmill and take 1000 frames per second of video for in-depth analysis of stride, balance, and efficiency.

In other words, it's okay for rich countries like the US to use technology to optimize the performance of their athletes, to the detriment of those in poorer countries who do not have such advantages.

And yet, it is considered sacriligious to "violate" the spirit of competition by taking a few performance-enhancing drugs here and there?

Re:What a weird, fucked up world...

[surprise_audit]

And don't forget that the athletes competing in the Olympics are supposed to be amateurs - i.e. not people who's job it is to train all day, every day, so that they excel in a particular event.

So, here's my proposal - allow any given athlete to receive a certain amount of funding, but put an upper limit on it. Let them get contributions to allow them to buy decent equipment, and to travel to competitions, etc, but not allow them multi-million-dollar research facilities, and so on.

Yeah, there's still potential for abuse - e.g a sprint shoe maker could do the research "for themselves" and just happen to donate $100 pairs of shoes to certain athletes. So there's details still to work out, but it would push back closer to the "natural athlete" that's all but disappeared these days.

Re:from the way it looks...

[Anonymous Coward]

but who's to say what his natural T production was before the cancer? He's almost certainly received a "boost."

Doubt it. Elevated levels of testosterone will cause whole-body muscle growth even in couch potatoes, let alone world-class athletes. If he upped his testosterone he'd also be packing on weight (dense muscle mass) which would seriously hinder his ability to ride uphill. Chemo destroyed his muscle mass so when he started riding again, he didn't have the upper body he used to (as a triathlete) which has helped his mountain-climbing times immensely. Taking extra testosterone would be counterproductive as he would be dragging around a lot more useless weight all over.

Cyclists are helped by extra oxygen production, and my guess is that extra muscle would consume more oxygen just for maintenance.

I can possibly see a use for testosterone, though, which would be to maintain muscle mass while engaged in strenuous endurance activity. You wouldn't want *extra* muscle but maybe it would help to keep it there so your body doesn't cannibalize it for energy.

But they eat so much anyway, I don't know if that's even a factor.

This just highlights the inherent meaninglessness

[localman]

We take these competitions too seriously. If we're talking about gene manipulation to create extra amounts of naturally occuring chemicals, then we're talking situations that can arise naturally. In fact there was a story not long ago about some baby born with super-muscles.

So what's the problem? Some people are born with genes that enable them to be better athletes. Now some people want to emulate that. Sure, it seems like cheating to me, but if someone has super muscles naturally that seems unfair as well. What the are we trying to test in the olympics anyways? Skill? Will? Natural genetic perfection? A combination of all three?

Seems to me that the focus on superlatives (as opposed to just excellence), combined with globalization, has forced us into a corner. What is the point of superlatives, anyways? What do we really want to know?

Also, I don't know if I think genetic manipulation is any less ethical than brainwashing children to devote their life to perfection in a single pursuit before they've had a chance to experience anything else.

As far as I'm concerned, the whole Olympic thing is just a big commercial opportunity. I'm all for individuals being their best, and competing. But it's just so dirty now and it doesn't seem to serve any meaningful purpose.

Just my take.

Cheers.

PS -- Speaking of testing will: I once broke my arm in an arm wrestling match. Seriously. This means I had the will and strength to torque my own humerus (with the help of an equally strong friend) until it spiral fractured. I don't know what it proved, but I would say it's the superlative of something ;)

It was just a matter of time

[Donny Smith]

It is interesting to consider parallels between bio-engineered doping and aesthetic surgery.

Somewhere I read how one participant at a beauty contest admitted she'd fixed her looks and then other participants requested her disqualification.
She was the only "enhanced" beauty - she was the only honest one.

So what can we do? Can we draw a line?
A corrective surgery disqualifies you but another emergency surgery to fix broken nose from a traffic accident doesn't?
Or bar every one who's ever "went under the knife" from participation? Are braces illegal because they're used instead of corrective teeth surgery?

The same is with sports - why can one individual have a mutated gene and I can't? Since it's not "natural" (as in "common"), why only him/her?

One way to make it fair is to make everything allowed. Of course for many that will have bad consequences for their health, but so do current "enhancers" that cannot be detected. And ultimately it is up to the athlete to make a decision - as is now.
Can they disallow that? It's undetectable and "natural" - unless they expand testing to athletes' parents and families there's no way they can detect if a gene or whatever is natural or mutated.

Coaches should have criminal responsibility for providing athletes with dangerious/harmful substances to keep coaches in the check.
While it's not easy to say what is just "bad for you" and what is really dangerous, but at least reasonable due dilligence would suffice.

I do think the _current_ system is unfair - people with disabilities cannot compete at all, people with "normal" genes aren't (very) competitive. So the system is biased in favor of the few sprinkled with couple genetic anomalies (=improvements).

And finally - bring the whole genetic performance enhancing idea to education - woooo hoooo!
Since the society is powered by greed, most people will give their kids anything to make them better off...

This is only the beginning...