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An Olympic Games For Enhanced Athletes?
ananyo writes "With the Olympics due to kick off on 27 July in London, Nature has taken a look at how far science would be able to push human athletic abilities if all restrictions on doping were lifted. The article mentions anabolic steroids (up to 38% increase in strength), IGF-1 (4% increase in sprinting capacity), EPO/blood doping (34% increase in stamina), gene doping and various drugs and supplements, as well as more 'extreme' measures such as surgery and prosthesis. Hugh Herr, a biomechanical engineer at MIT, says performance-enhancing technologies will one day demand an Olympics all their own. But is that time already upon us?"
Wait. It isn't moral when the government says something, but it is moral when a human being is fed hormones and drugs so that the sponsors can peddle the next tennis shoe to a million voyeurs in front of all those TVs?
You have some morals you can be proud of.
Mad Magazine had this a long time ago. Pretty funny.
You will be modded funny, but I would mod you insightful.
Beside prior art, you may also look at other capital and publicity intensive spectacle sports, like Formula 1. You would have a few well funded stables, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer; and commentators would speculate non-stop whether which athlete is going to be recruited in which stable. Newspapers would delight in the gore of overdoses, deaths and bio-mechanical accidents of all kinds. Truly dystopian and I hope never to see pharmaceuticals get their way with such a monstrosity. It takes a mobster mentality to think of such a thing, even half seriously.
Why shouldn't one be allowed to choose what they do to their body?
As long as there is no coercion to the individual ("do this or we send you and your family to the rape pits") and it truly is that individual's choice what they do to their body, I don't really care what an athlete does to themselves.
Maybe put restrictions - no modifications allowed until after the age of 18 and then after that they can consent to whatever - so that children aren't being damaged any more than they already are by being pushed to hyper-competitiveness.
Now, I do feel bad for people who have wrecked their bodies in the name of sport, but by and large, it's their choice to do so. I work with an ex-football player who, at the ripe old age of 50, has severe arthiritis in knees, hips, elbows and shoulders, has had multiple back surgeries, and who, when it's cold and damp out basically needs Vicodin in order to function through the pain, but he has said he wouldn't have given up playing even if he knew just how bad he would feel now, and that it was worth it. I feel bad for him, but I'm not going to try and protect people from themselves as long as they're capable of making a relatively informed decision.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
So you would fully support blood sport where two gladiators willingly fight each other to the death?
There is a line where we should not cross, and I find allowing a "drug olympics" is crossing that line.