Athletes May Next Seek Genetic Enhancement

[kamikaze]

Quoted from NY times.
This is very interestinng article.
Take a look!!
If you would like to read whole article, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/sp...ts/21DRUG.html

Now, through the World Anti-Doping Agency, the I.O.C. wants to anticipate the possibility that athletes will begin re-engineering certain genes to strengthen their muscles, increase their oxygen-carrying capacity, block their pain or speed their pace of healing from injury.

[VEGETA990]

I know for a fact that doctors can enter a persons brain and "turn off" the area where you care about pain. Kinda weird. They do it for really bad cases of people with phantom limbs. For them, the pain is always there, they just don't care about it anymore. lol. That's not genetic engineering though

[VEGETA990]

So what does the article say, you have to subscribe to read it

[kamikaze]

Followings are pasted from NY times,3/21/2002.


The International Olympic Committee has seemingly been playing catch-up for years with athletes who use sophisticated means to mask their use of steroids, human growth hormone, erythropoietin, or EPO, and other performance-enhancing drugs.

Now, through the World Anti-Doping Agency, the I.O.C. wants to anticipate the possibility that athletes will begin re-engineering certain genes to strengthen their muscles, increase their oxygen-carrying capacity, block their pain or speed their pace of healing from injury.

"The best way to deal with it is to prevent it and move quickly to the forefront of the technology," Dick Pound, the anti-doping agency's chairman, said yesterday in Manhattan after a conference on genetic enhancement in athletics at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., that was attended by scientists, sports officials, educators and ethicists.

The use of drugs, and, perhaps, more startling, the engineering of genes to enhance performance, raises questions about the notion of what an athlete is. Is he the product of his genetic makeup, environment and training?

Or can he add to his natural stew with the latest in scientific advances?

Pound, a former Olympic swimmer and longtime I.O.C. member, said, "Sports are designed by people for people — people are not designed for a particular sport."

Still, that purism has been tainted by drug use; altering genes appears to represent the latest temptation.

Research into genetic therapy for legitimate medical purposes has been taking place for years, with only limited success so far. Pound said there was no evidence that the emerging genetic technology had been used by athletes. Some experts wonder, though, if illicit efforts are under way to harness the emerging techniques for athletics. "It's impossible to say there isn't clandestine work in genetics going on," said Theodore Friedmann, professor of pediatrics at the University of California's Center for Molecular Genetics in San Diego.

Christopher Evans, director of the Center for Molecular Orthopedics at Harvard Medical School, raised the question a different way. "Could a rogue person be doing this in his basement?" he said. "Probably."

Pound suggested that genetic enhancement could be widespread among athletes within five years, underscoring the need to develop ways of detecting such abuse before it occurs.

The scientific and sports communities are faced with a dilemma: the same genetic transfer techniques that would be used for legitimate medical therapies — think of an anterior cruciate ligament that does not tear when a ton's worth of defensive linemen tackle a running back — could also be used illicitly.

"How do we distinguish enhancement from treatment?" said Joseph Glorioso, director of the Pittsburgh Human Gene Therapy Center at the University of Pittsburgh. "Athletes should have rights of access to therapies. But we have to control the length of expression of the gene, and that will take a lot of judgment."

Friedmann said therapy and enhancement were part of a continuum in which a genetic treatment to heal a short-term injury could also lead to the long-term enhancement of the athlete's genetic makeup.

[VEGETA990]

Well, I for one would like to up my genes. I wonder how they specifically do it. I know my bio professor could inject my skin with a "glow in the dark" gene (occurs in some kind of jellyfish). Scientists have all ready done it with mice.

If they can do that, why not inject me with the strength gene of a bear, lol. I'm up for it.