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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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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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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Exactly. So what you are saying is that if two athletes have the same "training, coaching and drilling on technique, mental toughness (How nutured/mentored), opportunity and desire also contribute", then the winner is determined by genetics. How is that fair?
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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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?