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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?"
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?
...olympic games, which was pretty much anything goes and to the winner go the spoils.....
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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?
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If only there was a +1, Pity...
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Could the same "gene-doping" be used to combat muscular dystrophy? Sounds like this may have more than one use. Like steroids.
Do not touch -Willie
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.
"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".
A whole other class of improve your [insert attribute here] spam on the way!
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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.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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 wonder if they can do the same for IQ or concentration? This would be handy for the chess competitors... And for me... I could complete my world domination scheme... hmmmm...
KHHHAAAAAANNNNNNN!
"Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority." - Dr. Who
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."
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.
"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??
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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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"Powers. I have them."
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
- HadrivenAt 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.
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!
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.
No, his job is to sit and count the money he made in the buyout of slashdot.
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 )
Some people act like nobody will know they copied and pasted.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
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?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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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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.
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...
Actually, in the original olympics, all forms of magic were band. Whether they be charms of "potions."
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
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.
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!
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
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?
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
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.
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...