In the sporting world, there are plenty of examples of dependence on engineering: race cars, golf clubs, even baseball bats. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that someday — today? — our athletes will be engineered, too.
The effects here go way past sports, straight into everyday life. Should parents be able to choose the sex of their baby? What about hair color? Eyes? Physical attributes like height and build?
Medical researchers have come to expect that their advancements, aimed at treating disease, will eventually be used for less-than-noble purposes. After all, AIDS patients sometimes sell their prescription HGH to bodybuilders.
But sports leagues and organizations are scrambling to come up with answers to how they can deal with a problem that is potentially more pervasive and less detectable than anything we’ve seen involving steroids and HGH.
“We’re going to have to start looking at patterns, rather than just what’s there at this present time,” says John Lombardo, a 30-year veteran of sports medicine and the NFL’s advisor on performance-enhancing drugs. “You look at what somebody’s pattern or profile does over years, then use that as a mechanism. Not just a positive test, but be able to say, ‘Well, this is altered and this doesn’t happen naturally.’ ”
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Nine Paris boys were diagnosed with the same fatal disease as the Texas Bubble Boy. Beginning in 1999, doctors experimented and gave each boy transplants of his own bone marrow cells corrected by a gene transfer.
All immediate indications were positive. After about three years, one had developed a leukemia-like disease. Three months after that, another. Both boys died, sending emergency halts to other gene therapy projects around the world.
So it doesn’t take Friedmann long to answer what the dangers are that we’re working with.
“Death,” he says. “Death is a danger. You don’t play with these methods.”
This is a dangerous spot we’re in right now, where there’s enough knowledge to mess with genes but not enough history to know what the effects will be. Experimentation right now could be fatal.
They say the technology is so immature that the only certainty here is that something will go wrong. Deaths are the price of progress when trying to treat fatal disease, but hardly justified when trying to improve athletic performance.
One experiment involved altering the genes of monkeys to boost their red blood cells, which allowed them to test off the charts in endurance tests. Unexpectedly, and without warning, the floor fell out of monkeys’ blood production and they eventually died of anemia.
There is no “off switch” in much of what these gene alterations do. Which is why one scientist warned athletes to only genetically enhance the muscles they don’t really want, so that the flesh could be cut out if it grows too big or too fast or both.
In time, genetic engineering may very well be safer than steroid or HGH use. But that time is not now, not yet.
“I think if athletes really paid attention to what it means to change a gene,” Lombardo says, “they’d be very hesitant to do it. At least the state of the art right now. Most of the studies have been done in medical conditions, and most of them haven’t been real successful.”
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The future of gene engineering is the future of sports, and vice versa. As Rodeo says, “you’re talking about the next frontier of doping.”
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