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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?"
Mad Magazine had this a long time ago. Pretty funny.
I've wondered what F1 would be like without all the restrictions. Modifying humans to this extreme is probably going to have unforeseen consequences in the long term. However with F1, if you were to take out the human element and have AI or remote control, you needn't worry about human safety and could lift all sorts of restrictions, allowing R+D budgets to be spent on whole new automotive areas.
No, the point of olympic/professional sports is making money via entertainment.
Not all drugs that increase performance will kill or even harm the user. I take a drug daily(prescribed by a doctor) that measurably improves the quality of my life and the length of it. It also improves my performance in some physical tests.
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.
And then we won't have athletes representing countries any more, but drug companies.
"Well, GlaxoSmithKline are looking great, taking home four gold medals, two silvers and five bronzes so far. This is sure to push their stock price up substantially for the coming year."
Did not RTFA.
As an addendum, imagine the benefits if more effort was put into developing a safe and effective mystatin inhibitor/blocker.
Not only would it be useful for professional athletes and those suffering from muscular dystrophy, if it was safe it could also be used by "regular people". It probably wouldn't be a "wonder drug" to make everyone fit, not by a long shot, but it would help the average guy who can't quite find time to work out as often as he wants put on more muscle mass, it could help someone who's overweight store more energy as muscle rather than fat.
Obviously I'm speculating but there are definitely interesting applications once you look beyond "all changes to the human body that enhance performance are evil".
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Right, because I remember the time I was almost forced by the NFL to be a starting quarterback, was almost forced by the NBA to play professional basketball, etc.
Its their choice to:
A) Play their chosen sport professionally
B) Play in a league that allows it
C) Participate in taking those drugs/hormones
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Sport is when you go out and do it, not when you watch in from behind that bucket of potato chips or popcorn. Well, at least in my world.
You seem to have wandered into the foreign territory of slashdot, where exercise is climbing the stairs from mom's basement to raid the fridge.
Unless they want to die at 35 of a cancer or something, I wouldn't advise it. One of the reason those kind of things are banned is because they are dangerous
On the other hand, the present regulatory state(where even using the ones that are legal by prescription can get you tossed right out of the sport) has unfortunate side effects of its own: since development of assays for novel drugs tends to lag behind, but not too far behind, development of novel drugs, there is a strong incentive for people to move away from drugs with the most testing and data available and toward novel ones with poorly characterized risks, to avoid being caught. Also, because the doping is largely clandestine, society at large is denied a valuable source of information about the effects and risks of performance enhancing drugs.
Olympia has long since ceased to be a sports event. This is entertainment delivered by modern day gladiators who sacrifice health and life in a quest for money and immoratility through fame.....
It isn't nearly as simple as you imagine it to be. Organized sports are a show business that has to consistently deliver extraordinary performances in order to attract coach potatoes and sponsors. The people who get into sports are attracted by the promise of fame and money, but this only goes to very few lucky ones.
Unfortunately, all who try are young, immature and quite often unaware of the consequences of the drugs they are using and the real costs they face. Many are lead into all this druggery by the coaches, peer pressure, etc. By the time they get the experience and maturity to be able to make a good decision it is already too late.
I've lost a friend to this kind of "sport". Heart attack at 29. Very moral.
I'm not sure Viagra is supposed to be used daily.
You can take your fundamentals, sir, and stick them where the sun don't shine. I want Hulk-like men who can make relativistic baseball a reality!! http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
It's a funny cartoon, but not funny when you look at the actual athletes. These people destroy their bodies pushing themselves to the limit. Even in ice skating which looks like a nice "easy" sport, people tear-up their knees or hips, and have permanent pain for the rest of their lives. In running Florence Griffith Joyner pushed herself so hard, she died before age 40. She had been training for the next olympics.
Let's NOT have an olympics where athletes use steroids and other enhancements to kill themselves prematurely.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Athletes of all stripes push their bodies to the limits, whether they're doping or not. That's sort of the point. Anything less than "to the limits" is considered half-assing it. Of course, they used to have football coaches that wouldn't let their boys drink water on the sidelines, so maybe what "to the limits" means could use some refinement.
I don't know about you, but on the rare occasion that I bother to work out, if I don't ache the next day, I feel a little bit cheated.
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.
Fights to the death were actually fairly rare in gladiatorial games because gladiators were so expensive to train that it would be wasteful.
That said, we already have things that are essentially bloodsport, but we pretend as if they aren't. What is boxing and MMA other than gladiatorial combat? Granted the purpose isn't to have people die, but it's certainly a risk, and long-term injury and debilitating brain damage is almost certain.
We also already have people doing incredibly unsafe things to their bodies in the form of training or drugs now, it's just that often times they pretend they aren't doing it. I would much rather have it be legal and in the open (and more closely supervised by medical pros) than illegal and hidden in the dark where we can't have any idea of what is going on. Making it legal would mean that people doing this would be more able to get adequate medical attention, would mean that more research could be done in the open about the long term effects, and would make it easier to inform the general public about what kinds of things people are doing (sacrifices they make) to excel.
There is no way we will ever stop people from using performance enhancements. I recognize that and think that, in a world where people will use those enhancements it's much better to have it in he open and supervised than the dark and unsupervised.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.