A Separate Olympics for Gene Dopers?

July 03, 2008

We’ve already talked about whether China should alter the weather at this year’s Olympic games in Beijing, but here’s another Olympic-related question for you. How far should athletes be allowed to go in altering themselves in the quest for gold medals?

World-class competitors already push their bodies to almost unfathomable extremes. A recent New York Times Magazine profile of four-time Olympic swimmer and 2008 hopeful Dara Torres described her brutal training regimen, which includes two hours of swimming every morning, another hour and a half of strength training in the afternoon, and every other day, a third grueling two-hour session of resistance stretching, in which a pair of trainers force her body into various contortions to increase her range of motion when she’s propelling herself through the water. Years of such intense workouts have produced a physique like this.

But even an athlete willing to devote many hours a day to working out is still limited by his or her genetic potential. I’ve seen it estimated that as much as 50 percent of athletic ability is determined by the genes, and scientists have found at least 70 regions on the human genome that have something to do with physical prowess. Whether or not a sprinter has the explosive power to run the 100 meters in world-class time, for example, may be determined in part by whether or not he or she has a variation of the alpha-actinin-3 gene, which gives the body proportionately more fast-twitch muscle fibers than, say, the average jogger. (Here’s a 2003 New Scientist article on a study looking at the genetic difference between Australian sprinters and distance runners.)

Certain genetic variations can give a person extraordinary abilities. Case in point: the Finnish cross-country skier Eero Antero Mäntyranta, who won two gold medals in the 1964 Winter Olympics in part because of a mutation in the erythropoietin receptor gene, which gave him more red blood cells to deliver oxygen to his muscles than his competitors had. And last year, I was intrigued by this Associated Press article about Liam Hoekstra, a Michigan toddler with a rare genetic condition known as myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy, which causes his muscle cells to reject myostatin, a protein that normally limits muscular growth. (About 100 cases have been identified worldwide.) As a result, at 19 months, Liam had 40 percent more muscle mass than the typical human and almost no body fat, which not only made him more buff than a young Erik Estrada, but also enabled him to perform jaw-dropping feats of strength.

"He could do the iron cross when he was 5 months old," said his adoptive mother, Dana Hoekstra of Roosevelt Park. She was referring to a difficult gymnastics move in which a male athlete suspends himself by his arms between two hanging rings, forming the shape of a cross. "I would hold him up by his hands and he would lift himself into an iron cross. That's when we were like, 'Whoa, this is weird,'" Hoekstra said.

I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to see this kid on a Wheaties box in 20 years or so.

Given the tremendous advantage that the right genes provide to an athlete, it’s perhaps inevitable that truly driven, if not quite scrupulous, competitors will someday put aside the steroids and stimulants and turn to tinkering with their own DNA. Gene doping would basically work the same way as gene therapy, except that instead of, say, genetically modifying the white blood cells of a person with an immune system deficiency, scientists would insert modified genes into the cells of a healthy athlete to increase muscle growth or aerobic capacity.

You might think that the sports world would be leery of creating Frankenjocks. But to the contrary, when University of Pennsylvania geneticist H. Lee Sweeney gave lab mice a gene splice that caused their cells to pump out the muscle growth stimulating hormone insulin-like growth factor 1, he quickly got a call from an unnamed sprinter who pleaded with Sweeney to become the first human recipient. As a 2007 article in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian recounts:

Later that day there was a similar call from another athlete and the next day brought several more. By the end of the week, Sweeney had received dozens. 'I was besieged,' he says. Then coaches began ringing and what they wanted disturbed Sweeney even more. “I took a call from one coach of an American college football team. He wanted me to inject every one of his players with the IGF-1 gene. To be fair, he did back down when I pointed out the techniques had not been tested on humans. Not every coach was that enlightened, however. Some would have quite happily tried out untested genetic enhancement techniques on all their players on the off-chance that might give them an edge over opponents.”

Of course, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the major watchdog against performance-enhancing drugs in sports, is dead-set against gene doping as well. But officials are at a loss as to how to prevent genetic modification. The chemicals produced by genetically modified cells are indistinguishable from chemicals produced by unmodified cells. Plus, they’re generated locally in the affected tissue, so they’re not going to show up in a blood or urine test, the way that performance-enhancing drugs might. In short, there’s no way to tell whether an athlete is a genetic cheater or simply fortunate enough to have a rare genetic mutation.

And that last point finally leads us to our usual outlandish proposal. Since it might not be possible to ferret out genetically altered athletes, why even try? Instead, perhaps we should set up a competition or category especially for them, sort of the way that the NCAA created Division I-A and the Bowl Championship Series so that big-time college football programs could stop pretending that they weren’t for-profit businesses. I was going to call my brilliant idea the Mutant Olympics, until a Google search revealed that  Engadget blogger Phillip Torrone came up with the same identical idea back in 2004. Here’s how he envisioned it:

The Mod Class is a classification for "anything goes"— gene therapy, growth hormones, steroid, whatever you want to do. We think people will LOVE to watch this, it'll be like watching an action film or a comic book, all these folks breaking world records, leaping 50 feet. There is still of course regular human class, and if someone starts to dominate that category, they get moved in to the Mod Class.

OK, so this isn’t quite what Baron de Coubertin envisioned. But it’d be a lot fairer than what is likely to transpire otherwise. And think of the TV ratings that a Mutant Olympics would get — who knows, they might even want to put it on pay-per-view. And for inspirational purposes, maybe they could enlist Barry “Asterisk” Bonds to lead the flame-lighting ceremony.

So what’s your opinion? Feel free to express it below.

Comments

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

A mutant Olympics. I like the sound of that!

[George M. Cohan]

Where do you get these warped ideas? Using gene doping to cheat really defeats the whole purpose of athletic competition.

[Frank Minish]

If you have to cheat to be competitive then what is the point of even having the games at all. If athletes cheat to win then they are not athletes at all and if you give those people their own games then the whole world is basically saying it is alright to cheat, what happened to having values and living healthy and properly and what is all this teaching our kids. If you cheat you don't compete, period.

[Sammy]

Finding ways to get around the rules is just part of the game. A mutant Olympics would be spectacular to watch, that's for sure. May the best gene doper win!

[Dara Torres Rocks!]

It's possible to do some pretty amazing physical feats without this sort of cheating. Look at Dara Torres' victory in the 100 freestyle on Friday night! She's actually volunteered for every type of testing imaginable to demonstrate that she's drug free.

[Cynic]

I seem to remember reading that there's some evidence that gene doping is going on already. Is it?

[Natural Man]

Using these unnatural methods to change one's body is an affront to the Most High.

[Pablo]

What are the long-term health consequences of gene doping? I can't imagine that this is good for the human body.

[Maddy the Boxer]

What ever happened to just trying hard and competing for the sheer joy of it? I can't believe that somebody would consider turning themselves into some sort of genetic freak for life, just to win a medal.

[Astroboy]

YAY!!!GO MUTANTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Happy Would-Be Mutant]

You people are being too squeamish. It's time to embrace the future. Someday genetic modifications will be as common as wearing contact lenses is today!

[RotorDoctor]

Great story line.. But is there some reason you used (what appears to be) the pictures of Olympic Champion, Dara Torres? Is there a hidden meaning here; a reason she should not be competing at 41? Or is it your position that she's to old and/or may have "done something" to enhance her demonstrated abilities? Poor choice of pictures for this. I would have used pictures of 80's East German She-Males..

GO DARA!!!!

[Patrick Kiger]

You raise a point that should be addressed. I mention Dara Torres in the story and describe her grueling training regimen as an example of the extremes to which athletes now push their bodies to achieve maximum performance, not to cast aspersions on her amazing records. I certainly hope that we didn't create that mistaken impression. As the recent NY Times profile of her http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29torres-t.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=dara%20torres&st=cse&oref=slogin notes, she has volunteered for a special U.S. Anti-Doping Agency program in which she is tested more extensively than most athletes. If anything, she's an example of the ideal that future athletes might try to replicate artificially through genetic manipulation.

Btw, for those of you out there who are athletes, the resistance stretching methods that Torres uses are really worth checking out. It's a little tricky mastering the technique, because it runs counter to the way that we usually learn to stretch, but you can feel the results almost immediately. Her stretching coach, Bob Cooley, has written an excellent how-to book, "The Genius of Flexibility," http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Flexibility-Smart-Stretch-Strengthen/dp/0743270878 which I recommend to anybody who's interested.

[Andrea]

Is it possible?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivzs6ji7mMs
http://www.infographic.tv/

Thanks
Andrea

[Patrick Kiger]

Yes, viruses can be modified for use as vehicles for genetic therapy. Whether anyone is already doing this to enhance athletic performance is unclear, but it wouldn't surprise me if Beijing turned out to be the Olympics with the first genetically modified athletes.

[Martin]

Some info on Gene Doping:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivzs6ji7mMs

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