Many top athletes regularly consume cocktails of drugs, extracts, food supplements, vitamins and drugs that improve their abilities. Will their next stop in the desperate race to gain an edge over their competitors be genetic manipulation to improve athletic performance?
Michael Sokolov, New York Times
https://www.hayadan.org.il/howtobuildsuperman.html
One day last December I was led through a maze of red brick buildings on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia. We went up to the fifth floor of one of the buildings, to the molecular physiology laboratory. I came to visit some mice and take a look at the future of sports.
I heard about these mice, I heard they were called "Mighty Mouse", but I was still amazed. They were there in some small cages together with normal mice. The "Mighty Mouse" looked like a different animal. Their build was like that of cattle, with a thick neck and large hindquarters. They seemed to belong in some kind of rat rodeo.
The researchers from the University of Pennsylvania used gene therapy on these mice to produce increased levels of Insulinlike Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1), a protein that promotes muscle growth and damage repair. They did this to unborn mice and four-week-old mice. The result was a kind of rodent's fountain of youth.
The size and strength of the mice's muscles is greater than normal and they do not lose these characteristics with age. In rats that underwent the same change and then went through fitness training - climbing small ladders with weights attached to their backs - the strength of the target muscles increased by 35% and when the training was stopped they did not lose a single percent of it, as happens to humans when they stop going to the gym.
The scientists, the Lee Sweeney, chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Prof. Elizabeth Barton, found the strange muscular system of their lab strain exciting. This research could bring enormous benefit to the elderly population and people with muscular dystrophy.
"What motivated us, at the beginning, in 1988, was the desire to develop a treatment that would stop the weakening of people as they get older," explained Sweeney, 50. "They fall and get injured. We wanted to do something about it."
in the atmosphere of "Casablanca"
Burton, 39, has broad shoulders and an athletic build befitting someone who has competed in bicycle races and triathlons in the past. "You see kids with muscular dystrophy, and their parents are so heartbroken about it, because it's just so sad," she said. "You see grandparents who can't get out of bed. It's for these people."
But the team from the University of Pennsylvania quickly realized that there was a population eager to see the practical uses of their research - a group of people who were already strong, but wanted to be even stronger. Sweeney receives emails from them. One message came from a high school football coach in western Pennsylvania shortly after Sweeney first presented his findings at a meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. "Some coach wanted me to take care of his whole team," he says. "I told him it was more Not ready for use on humans and that it may not be safe, and that if I torture him, they will send us all to prison. I can only assume he didn't realize how experimental it was. Or maybe his team didn't manage to win, and he might lose his job."
Other calls and emails came from weightlifters and bodybuilders. This sort of thing often happens after researchers publish research, even if it's in the most obscure scientific journals. An entire subculture of performance-enhancing athletes and trainers and pharmacists is eager for the developments. the latest medical
Sweeney knows what he's doing works. The question that remains, the one that will require many more years of research to answer, is how safe these methods are. But many athletes don't care. They want an edge now. They want publicity and recognition. They want a return for the many years of sweat and sacrifice, at any cost.
"This was serious science, not science in the service of sport," Dr. Gary Wadler, a representative of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) told me when I spoke to him about the experiments conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. "As soon as it comes To some legitimate journal, Trach, these people immediately get their hands on it and want to know how they can exploit it to their dubious advantage."
Sweeney's research will likely be appropriated before it is even applied to any medical purpose. Someone will use it to build a better sprinter or putter. Around the sport today there is a dim atmosphere like in the movie "Casablanca". We are in a period of change. No one is completely clean, no one is completely dirty. The rules are not clear. Everyone and everything is a little suspicious.
A few months before baseball player Barry Bonds was called before a grand jury in December to answer questions about his ties to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, also known as Balco, which was at the center of a drug distribution scandal, and after the discovery of a new synthetic steroid, THG, an American runner In the name of Kelly White ran the race of her dreams at the World Championships in Paris. She won gold medals in the 100 and 200 meters, the first American woman to ever win both of these races together at a world championship in an open stadium. In both runs, White, who weighs 61 kg and is 1.64 m tall, achieved the best results of her career.
White, 26, went out to celebrate her victory on a shopping spree on the Champs Elysees during which she saw her name appear in a newspaper headline. She asked a Parisian to translate for her and that's how she found out that the results of a test to detect illegal drugs conducted on her after the race are positive and that the medals and the 120 thousand dollars she received may be taken from her. She later admitted to using the stimulant modafinil, but claimed that she needed it to treat narcolepsy, but she did not bother to indicate this on the form she filled out before the competition. What she added next, perhaps revealed more than she intended. "After a competition," she told reporters in Europe, "it's a little difficult to remember everything you take during the day."
The THG scandal and the attention it focused on Balko, who advised dozens of top athletes (including Kelly White) on the use of nutritional supplements, exposed the dark side of sports and the fascinating cat and mouse game between rogue chemists and the labs trying to monitor them.
But White's statement revealed another, deeper truth: top athletes in many sports regularly consume cocktails of vitamins, extracts and supplements, dozens of pills a day—they are the only people who regularly take more pills than AIDS patients—hoping that their permitted drug concoctions will mimic the effects of The prohibited substances consumed by the cheaters. Cheaters and non-cheaters alike are essentially guinea pigs. They are the sum of all their innate athletic abilities, the sum of all their training, and the sum of all the compounds and powders they ingest and inject.
At the highest levels of sport the tunnel leading to success is narrow. Mainly in the non-team Olympic disciplines. An athlete who has dedicated his life to short runs, for example, must be accepted into one of the handful of spots on the Olympic team. And in order to become famous and earn significant sums of money, he probably needs to win one of the gold medals that are distributed once every four years.
The temptation to cheat is human. At the pinnacle of international sport, he is irresistible.
After Kelly White tested positive for banned drugs, the US Olympic Committee revealed that five other American track and field athletes tested positive for Modafinil last summer. Did they all suffer from narcolepsy? Hard to believe. More likely, because the rumor about Modafinil and its performance-enhancing properties (probably together with the misinformation because there is still no test that detects it) made her wings.
For athletes, the whole area of performance-enhancing techniques and drugs raises issues of health, fair play and, in some cases, legality. For the sport's audience, the fans, the issues are primarily philosophical and aesthetic.
At the most basic level, what are we watching and why? If we claim that achievement equals determination and character, and that after all has always been part of our connection to sports – to celebrate the physical expression of the human spirit – how do we recalibrate our thinking about sports in light of the fact that laboratories play a part in sporting success?
It seems that professional baseball, which entered the field of drug testing late and later instituted a non-strict program, decided that the power generated by inflated players is good for playing in the entertainment market. Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, who broke home run records for the season, were folk heroes and drew large crowds. Their mentions in the record books became the dominant stories of the various seasons. (Barry Bonds was less popular only because of sour public persona). But the sport has changed a lot. Muscle baseball is pretty much the opposite of what I and many other fans over the age of 30 grew up on. A game that had strategy, bunting, stolen bases, a hit and run move - what is called Little Ball.
Professional basketball is not generally suspected of being laced with steroids and other performance enhancers. But anyone who has seen even a few minutes of old games on the ESPN Classic network from, say, 20 years ago, is immediately struck by the evolution in the physical structure of the players. Regardless of how it happened, today's NBA players are heavier and arguably more muscular, and the game is tailored to their strengths. It is worn according to the aesthetics of steroids. What was once a sport of grace and geometry - athletes moving towards empty spaces on the floor, thinking in terms of shot angles - is now a game primarily of power and aggression: the players are drawn to the same space and try to climb over each other or pass through each other.
But sports that have fixed standards and desirable records are the ones that pose the greatest conundrum to fans. If what is exciting is seeing someone jump using a pole to a new height that is unimaginable - how do we react when our historical frame of reference is distorted due to the suspicion, or the known fact, that the athlete's supreme power comes from a prohibited substance?
At the top of the sports world, the connections of competitors who have never been prosecuted for doping or who are known to have failed drug tests can still raise questions. Marion Jones, the amazing runner of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, was married to shot putter CJ Hunter - who was removed from this Olympics after it was found that the results of his test for the steroid nanderlone were positive. Jones later divorced Hunter, but was later coached (briefly) by Charlie Francis, the former coach of Ben Johnson, the disgraced Canadian sprinter who was stripped of his Olympic gold medal.
Carl Lewis, America's greatest Olympic athlete and long known as the leader of a crusade against performance-enhancing drugs—he who lost to steroid-ridden Ben Johnson in the 1988 Seoul Olympics—has been accused of failing a drug test before the entrance exams. to the 1988 US Olympic team.
The purity of the sport?
The whole situation craves some clarity, but the closer you look, the more blurred the picture becomes. Let's start with the line that separates what is legal from what is illegal when it comes to performance improvement. The line, which is already blurred today, will probably disappear completely over time.
Last September I visited an American swimmer while technicians sealed off his bedroom and then installed equipment there that reduces the amount of oxygen in his room and turned it into a vacuum chamber. It's a common and legitimate training method that Ed Moses, the best breaststroker in the United States, said he hoped would increase his red blood cell (oxygen-carrying) count. Perfected in Portland, Oregon, the desired effect of the so-called "live high, train low" method - sleep at altitude, train at altitude Sea level - the same as the effect obtained from taking erythroid protein, or EPO, which increases the production of red blood cells and which is prohibited for use in sports.
To draw the sometimes arbitrary lines between improving performance and not affecting performance, between risking health and "unsafe but use the substance at your own risk" - to ensure that the sport remains "pure" - an extensive world-wide bureaucracy has been mobilized.
At the lowest level are those who knock on the doors of athletes in their homes and apartments in the USA and Europe and in the mountain villages of Kenya and at the training sites in China and demand urine samples "out of competition". At the top of the pyramid are the laboratories around the world that are selected to check if there are traces in the urine (and blood) of top athletes Molecules of one of the hundreds of prohibited substances are at the top of the pyramid of the bodies that fight drugs The titans of international sports - those people who can't make sure that a figure skating competition is judged fairly.
The Titans created the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which works in cooperation with governments and national organizations responsible for the issue, including the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). Together with the urine sample collections, the various messengers in the custody network and the laboratories, WADA must ensure that the world's top athletes are clean, and in addition that they have not concealed the use of drugs by using various "concealing substances".
This is an extremely complicated enterprise, which requires WADA to keep up with the rapidly advancing science, to disseminate information to thousands of athletes, to navigate through different legal systems so that accused competitors receive due process, and finally to manage the global trade in urine samples. And all this, in the end, is apparently pointless.
Despite the hundreds of people and tens of millions of dollars dedicated to the effort, national and international sports organizations may not want to catch and punish those who cheat. The US, specifically, has been singled out as particularly remiss in its oversights. "The real problem is that the US track and field industry is completely flouting the law," WADA president Richard Pound told me. "They make great efforts to hide identities and data, and to flatter athletes whose drug tests came out positive."
Is it really possible to have an anti-doping enterprise without the full cooperation of the most powerful nation in the world - which is also the most powerful sports nation? Hard to see how that could be.
The more difficult question is whether it will be possible to get ahead of the fraudsters from a scientific point of view. The rogue scientists and coaching gurus have been winning for years, and have more tools at their disposal than ever before. THG, the substance that led to the opening of the investigation against Balko, is just a slightly smarter version of the old thing: an anabolic steroid - the type of substance that builds muscle mass and strength, and which has been common in the world of sports since the XNUMXs. But its discovery required an insider's tip, and THG is child's play compared to what's expected in the near future (if it's not already here, actually): genetic manipulation to improve athletic performance.
Ultimately, the debate about athletic doping goes beyond sports. "The current fight against doping," says John Huberman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has written extensively on performance-enhancing drugs, "is a sort of confused referendum on the future of human enhancement."
Pete Rose was a classic example of a "self built" athlete. This is basically code for someone who looks unathletic making the most of his meager abilities. But fans overlooked important genetic traits that made him the all-time leading hitter in baseball - chief among them, extraordinary durability that allowed him to play 24 seasons virtually injury-free. And what did Rose do to get this ability? Nothing, actually. As the son of an athlete who played amateur baseball and football into his early forties, he achieved such a solid and unbreakable body through genetic inheritance. In the offseason, to keep fit, Rose used to play basketball several times a week and ate fatty food and lots of fried snacks.
When it comes to sports at the highest level, there is no such thing as "building yourself up". No amount of devotion can turn someone of average ability into a world-class sprinter, NBA player, or marathon champion. You can't be an Olympic champion pistol shooter unless you have some innate steadiness of the hand or a Tour de France cyclist without much greater than average efficiency in delivering oxygen to the muscles. Even a gray and physically unimpressive player on a major league baseball team has something - usually extraordinary hand-eye coordination - that those who see natural athletic talent only in terms of size, speed, stamina or strength miss.
The war of genetic abnormalities
Brooks Johnson, an Olympic running coach, once told me that sport at the highest levels is essentially a competition between "genetic outliers." He mentioned Carl Lewis and Michael Jordan. But anyone who reaches the high levels of Olympic competition, or receives a salary for professional sports, can be associated with the same category. It is not possible to become a top athlete through willpower alone, or through grueling training, without starting long before the rest of the human race.
It is possible, through perseverance and adherence to the goal alone, to jump one level up - from a mediocre Olympic sprinter to one of the first three places or to the final, from a player with low chances of being accepted into the NFL to a player who will be selected in the middle of the draft. Chemical performance enhancement can bring more significant changes, but the principle is similar. You have to be a member of the sport's elite to begin with.
At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, an Irish middleweight swimmer named Michelle Smith de Bruyne raised suspicion when she won three gold medals. It was later found that her drug tests were positive. But even before the alleged act of cheating she was already an international competitor, not just someone swimming pools in the Dublin municipal pool.
The use and abuse of performance-enhancing drugs in the highest level of sport, or doping as it has been called since the beginning of the 20th century, is a mutant form of exclusive competition. This is an attempt by people who are already part of a thin layer of humanity - the genetic exceptions - to gain an advantage over one another, to break through their own physical limits, in a way that they could not achieve through training alone. It seems that the word doping itself (doping in English) derives from the word "dope" in Dutch, an alcoholic drink that Zulu warriors drank before the battle.
While systematic doping - in the collaboration of chemists, doctors and trainers - is a modern phenomenon, the scientific interest in athletes is not new. The medical establishment used to treat athletes with curiosity and sometimes a little trepidation. Exercising and pushing yourself to the limit of physical ability is considered dangerous or even a form of disease. The science involved in sports was observational, an opportunity to examine the body in motion by observing people standing at the edge of human ability.
British physiologist I. V. Hill, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1922, studied runners at Cornell because "things of great interest to science can be found in the performance of that extraordinary machine, the human athlete," he wrote. John Huberman, a historian of doping in sports, wrote that scientists and doctors considered the athlete with the improved performance "a wonder of nature - an amazing phenomenon that does not require improvement."
Undoubtedly, athletes have long sought chemical and nutritional means to improve performance. The ancient Greeks ran and wrestled naked because nothing, not even cloth, was supposed to violate the purity of the sport, but they did eat mushrooms, sesame seeds, dried figs and various plants that they believed gave them a burst of energy before competition. Only a hundred years ago, marathon runners competed
and cyclists when under the influence of strychnine, which is both a stimulant and a poison. Cyclists have also used caffeine, cocaine, alcohol and even heroin.
What changed everything—what moved performance improvement efforts from superstition to real science—was the isolation of the male hormone testosterone in 1935. This is what led, until the end of the thirties, to the development of the synthetic testosterone variants, or anabolic steroids. The difference between steroids and all the performance enhancers that preceded them is that the effectiveness of the steroids is proven - and they work really well.
Almost every drug that athletes use to enhance their performance started a medical conference. Steroids are still given to men with severe testosterone deficiency. AIDS patients and others suffering from conditions that cause muscle wasting receive steroids.
Until the mid-XNUMXs, people suffering from severe anemia from chronic kidney failure or other causes had to receive frequent blood transfusions. The development of recombinant human EPO was a godsend. To raise their red blood cell count, anemics can now receive injections instead of transfusions.
But what will be the effect of EPO on a person with a normal or higher than normal red blood cell count? What can this contribute to an endurance athlete with favorable genetic characteristics and high physical fitness? Exactly what you would expect: to turn him into a super-endurance athlete.
EPO swept through Europe's pro cycling circuit like a plague and almost killed the industry. Police raids, large piles of EPO confiscated from riders' hotel rooms, arrests, trials, competitors suspended wholesale. "Each competitor had his own little suitcase with drugs and syringes," a former doctor for Europe's professional cycling teams told a British newspaper. "They injected themselves."
EPO has migrated to other endurance sports, including cross-country skiing, marathon running and sports navigation. Inevitably, the dangerous side of the drug was revealed.
"In the simplest terms, EPO encourages the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells," says Gary Wadler, the US representative for WADA. "But the balance is very delicate. There is such a thing as too much EPO. The body is a sensitive vessel. It has feedback mechanisms that maintain its balance. What these athletes try to do, many times, is to bypass the feedback, to 'work' on their body."
Between the years 1989 and 1992, seven Swedish athletes died engaged in sports navigation - a sport that combines running and walking, and is sometimes called "cross-country with a brain". It looks like death from a heart attack. Almost all were in their twenties. In addition to them, 18 Dutch and Belgian cyclists died in similar mysterious circumstances between 1987 and 1990. "At first they said it was some kind of virus, a virus in the respiratory system," says Wadler. "But what kind of virus kills only the most physically fit people in their country? The autopsies were private. The connection between these deaths was uncertain. But it was EPO. That was clear to a lot of people."
For weightlifters and competitors in "throwing" sports (shot put, javelin, discus, and hammer throw), the performance enhancers of choice have long been steroids. Anabolic steroids (anabolic means tissue builder) increase muscle mass and improve the explosiveness required for a wide variety of other sporting endeavors: running short distances, jumping, swimming, serving a tennis ball, swinging a baseball bat, passing a hit on the football field. They provide an additional advantage in violent sports such as football because one of their side effects is aggression or in extreme cases, tantrums.
Using them means a high risk versus the possibility of a large profit. Other side effects include liver tumors, impotence, enlarged breasts and shrunken testicles in men and male sexual characteristics in women (some of the side effects in women include enlarged clitoris, deepening of the voice, facial hair and male pattern baldness).
The records of the 80s
If you want a glimpse into the future of performance-enhancing sports – what doping athletes are capable of – look back to the mid-XNUMXs, the height of East Germany's shameful and terrifyingly effective doping program. The East Germans were not the only ones involved in pharmacological sports, they were just the most blatant and organized (East Germany is the only country known to have systematically drugged athletes, sometimes minors, without their knowledge).
"Things really got out of hand in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s," said WADA's Richard Pound. Even as the science of detection improved, the steps taken by the International Olympic Committee and other world sports bodies were shaped, he says, by a "hesitation born of the desire not to offend" either side when the world was still divided between East and West. "We preferred to close our eyes and it swelled up like a snowball."
The use of steroids works especially well in female athletes, because they naturally produce only a tiny amount of the testosterone that men produce. John Huberman says: "In the 1980s, what we saw was a new breed of monster athletes, especially among women."
Some of the records from these heyday of wild steroid use - especially in sports where raw power is a main requirement - show that achievements were achieved that are unlikely for a clean competitor to achieve. For men, the top 14 hammer throws in history occurred between 1984 and 1988. In women's shot put, you have to go down to 35th place to find a result achieved after 1988.
Until this past April, the top ten men's iron shot putts were accomplished between 1975 and 1990. Then, at a competition in Kansas, the American iron ball putter Kevin Tutt finally managed to break into this top group. The distance he hit, 22.67 meters, was the furthest anyone had managed to hit in 13 years. Six months later, Tut's name was the first to surface in the Balco scandal. In the published reports it was stated that the tests conducted on him showed a positive result for THG.
The star of women's short-distance running in the 100s - and still holds the world record in the 200 and XNUMX meters - was Florence Griffith Joyner, Flo-Jo. Americans went crazy for her style, her tight tracksuits, her long, colorful nails, her enthusiasm. Elsewhere in the world, and even in the US among those knowledgeable in the field of athletics, Flo-Jo's achievements were received with a little more skepticism.
After Joyner died in 1998, at the age of 38 (the cause was related to an epileptic seizure), a strange hybrid column appeared in the New York Times sports supplement. Written by Pat Connolly, who was the coach of Evelyn Ashford, the woman whose 100m record was broken by Joyner, the column was part obituary and part posthumous indictment. "Then, almost overnight, Florence's face changed - they hardened along with her muscles which now stood out as if she had been born with a barbell in the cradle," Connolly wrote. "It was hard not to wonder if she found herself an East German trainer and started taking performance-enhancing drugs."
Flo-Jo was very good, but never a world-class champion runner. Her performance in 1988 in Seoul was - in the incriminating jargon of international sports - anomalous.
We don't usually think of baseball in the context of throwing hammers, hitting iron balls, or women sprinting short distances. But in terms of anomalous performance, baseball is like East Germany in the XNUMXs.
Just as in the steroid-laden days of Olympic sport, deep suspicion clings to some of baseball's recent records. This is coupled with the grotesqueness of the appearance of some of the players, Curt Schilling, the All-Star broadcaster, told Sports Illustrated magazine, "There are guys who look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and arms and six or seven other limbs that look weird."
I'm not sure exactly who Schilling was referring to, but to me his comment brings to mind a specific photo taken during the 2002 season. The subjects are home run kings Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa, sitting together, both with thick necks and faces that look bloated. They look, well, unusual - and completely different from how they looked when they were young players. Bonds entered baseball lean and muscular, much like his late father, outfielder Bobby Bonds. Sosa, early in his career, was not very big and showed very little power at the bat.
The answer to the question of how many home runs can be achieved in one season is more open than the answer to the question of what is the fastest time a person can achieve in a 100 meter race. Factors such as the size of the pitch, the bounce of the ball and the ability of the opposing batsman affect the result. Nevertheless, the experience accumulated over a hundred years shows quite convincingly that about 60 home runs are the maximum.
In 1927, Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, which remained the record until 1961, when Roger Maris (in a slightly longer season) hit 61. But in 1998, Mark Maguire of the St. Louis Cardinals broke Maris' record, hitting 70 home runs. Rance.
Until the 2000 season, Barry Bonds had never hit more than 46 home runs in a season, and most years his home run total was around 30. But at age 35, when players' output usually starts to decline, he hit 49. He then became Superman, breaking Maguire's record and hitting 73 home runs.
Sosa's progress was even more remarkable.
In his first eight major league seasons, he averaged 22 home runs. However, each year his home run total increased steadily and he hit 40 home runs in 1996, which was a career high. He was named an All-Star exactly once. Unlike Bonds, he is not considered one of baseball's top players.
Then in 1998, the year McGuire broke the record, Sammy Sosa hit 66 home runs - six more than the great Babe Ruth hit in his best season. Sosa didn't finish. The following season he hit 63, and then had seasons of 50, 64 and 49 - the best five-year hitting streak in baseball history.
Last year, the Washington Post published a sad series of stories that revealed that teenagers from the player-rich Dominican Republic, home to nearly a quarter of the players signed to professional contracts in the US, who want to play in the US, are taking veterinary steroids to try to be strong enough to attract attention. The heart of the scouts.
Whether Sosa and Bundes built up the power for all those home runs with chemicals can't be known for sure. No one presented evidence that they did so, and both vehemently deny it. Sosa's name did not come up in the Balko case and he did not testify before a grand jury.
Bonds did testify in December. The home of his fitness trainer and childhood friend, Greg Anderson, was searched by federal agents. Bonds admitted that he used to visit Balco, which under the management of Victor Conte, its founder, specialized in testing the blood of athletes to determine the levels of substances such as copper, chromium and magnesium in their blood, and in providing recommendations on supplements. Experts I spoke with say that Conte's theories are scientific nonsense, but he has advised dozens of top athletes, including runner Marion Jones; Amy Van Dyken, Olympic swimming champion; and Bill Romanowski, an NFL linebacker. Jason Giambi of the Yankees was also a client and he also testified before the grand jury.
In an article that appeared last June, Bonds told Muscle and Fitness magazine: "I've been going to Balco every 3 to 6 months. They test my blood to make sure my levels are what they should be. Maybe I should eat more broccoli than I normally do. Maybe I should Increase my zinc and magnesium intake."
The future is now
The World Anti-Doping Agency in Sports, WADA, for all that it is not perfect, is generally considered determined. The purpose of the agency, which was founded in 1999 at the World Conference on Doping in Sports held in Lausanne, Switzerland, was to introduce coherence to the anti-doping regulations and "harmonization" among the various countries and the sports bodies that were supposed to enforce them. In theory, this is the supreme authority on the issues of drugs and sports - which is above the National Olympic Committees and the national and international federations of all the various sports, and makes it difficult for these narrow interests to protect athletes who are caught using drugs.
WADA's medical committee spent several years preparing a fairly long list of prohibited substances. But the role of WADA and its president, Richard Pound, is primarily bureaucratic and political. WADA cannot slow down science - or influence a culture that pursues human improvements in all fields.
"All these issues will be a fad in 20 or 30 years," says Paul Roth Wolfe, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and responsible for the field of bioethics at NASA. "We are already seeing a blurring of lines between food and drugs. In the future it will be more common and accepted. We will eat certain genetically engineered food to be sharper during a business meeting, to increase confidence, to improve endurance before a race or competition."
Today, when WADA comes to determine whether to add a certain substance to its black list, it checks whether the substance enhances performance, whether it is against the spirit of sportsmanship or whether it may endanger health. "If it meets two of those three criteria, we'll probably add it to the list," says Pound.
But the first two criteria are vague. Steroids and EPO are clearly performance enhancers. But the drink Gatorade can also be considered as such, if its advertisements and all the data on the "science of the day" (hydration) published by the Gatorade Sport Science Institute are to be believed. And there are many other sports drinks that claim to do more than Gatorade. "You spot a line and move it where it is," says Pound. "Why is it a 100-meter race and not a 97-meter race? Like that."
Between Gatorade and anabolic steroids are all the powders and pills and injectables that top athletes put into their bodies, in amounts and combinations that can improve performance or prove ineffective. In most cases no one really knows.
The least open to interpretation category is "whether the substance may endanger health". Any medical or pseudo-medical activity that takes place underground or on the black market is dangerous by definition. Almost everyone, regardless of their opinion on abortion, will agree that it is much more dangerous when the abortion is performed in a side alley. The use of steroids, which is also not safe in most cases, is definitely more dangerous when it is done in the dark.
So health issues are the most significant rationale for WADA and the entire anti-doping enterprise: to protect athletes from their own worst instincts (although the sports world is selective in its concern for athlete health. NFL offensive linemen just keep getting fatter. The typical career of A pitch in professional baseball usually involves gradual wear and tear of the shoulder and elbow). But safety is about to become a less important issue.
"Right now we have a rough way to increase muscle mass," Volpe says. "In many years, we will look back on this method, and it will look low tech. When everything is placed on the dining table in every home, there will not be the same health issues that we see today with the illegal and unsupervised drugs and supplements."
The road to genetics
What I learned during my visit to Lee Sweeney's lab at the University of Pennsylvania is that using his research to improve athletic performance is not some futuristic science fiction. It is possible - today.
Sweeney and his team know that they can build muscle mass and strength. Their next step in trying to determine if their methods are safe for humans will be to conduct experiments on larger animals, most likely dogs with muscular dystrophy.
I asked Elizabeth Burton what would happen if some wayward country or illegal organization of athletes asked her to ignore medical precautions and create a human version of the Mighty Mouse. Is it possible to do this?
"If it's possible?", she answers. "Yes, sure, it's easy. It's doable. It's a routine method that's already been published. Anyone who can clone a gene and work with cells can do it. There's no mystery here."
Sweeney who was standing behind her, nodded his head in agreement. "It's not like growing a third hand or anything like that," he said. "If you work on it, it's achievable."
Sweeney says that if someone decides to use gene therapy to improve performance, "then it's not limited to what I'm doing. You can change the endurance of the muscle or change the speed—all aspects of performance. All the biological knowledge is there. If someone says, 'Here's $10 million - I want you to do everything you can think of in terms of sports. It's certainly possible to be very creative."
To strengthen the leg muscle in sprinters, says Sweeney, he "would put the whole leg on a bypass. I would isolate the leg and put the virus in through the blood. It's more effective than injections, because you'd need a lot of injections because these are big muscles. But it's not something that a surgeon of blood vessels cannot do".
Is it possible that someone is already doing this? "I don't know that it doesn't happen."
Already today, IGF-1 can be purchased online for oral use. It is advertised as an ingredient in various powders and pills, and as such it falls somewhere in that vast and nebulous realm of legal, so-called legal, black market or simply illegal substances - offered for sale in the loosely regulated supplement industry.
But Sweeney says that non-genetic transfer of the protein wouldn't be effective—it wouldn't flow in the blood at high enough levels to build muscle—and it's also not safe, because the little that would flow would be directed toward nonskeletal muscles, including the heart (the Mighty Mouse showed no signs of heart or other organs are enlarged and there is even a sign that IGF-1 is flowing in their bloodstream).
For top athletes, this will be one of the benefits of genetic IGF-1. It will not flow in the blood. It can only be discovered through a biopsy of the muscle. It took a long time for the world's athletes to agree to give blood tests; It's hard to imagine them agreeing to have probing needles shoved into their muscles.
WADA invited geneticists and others involved in current medical research to a conference held on Long Island in 2002. WADA representatives were (and still are) focused on IGF-1 research at the University of Pennsylvania, so Lee Sweeney was also there. He listened as Richard Pound tried to convey to the scientists a message they would not like to hear so much.
The president of WADA told the scientists that he certainly appreciates the work they do and knows that they approach the issue with great dedication and with one goal in mind, and he understands very well that there is nothing more important than finding cures for serious diseases. Then he talked about another "human activity" that he said was already threatened by a certain kind of science – the current science of performance enhancement – and could be destroyed by the misuse of their research. As they move forward, Pound asked, could they also think a little about the interest of the sport?
Pound remembers that the initial reaction was quite dismissive: "They said, 'We work at Ramat Hagan. It's not so easy to say what has changed from what was there naturally.'"
Pound, a lawyer by training, asked a rhetorical question: "What if I could guarantee that the Nobel Prize in Medicine would be awarded to the person in this room who finds a test to determine whether a competitor has been genetically enhanced? Then you could do that, right?"
Pound was agreed that discovery could be possible if sufficient means were devoted to it.
Lee Sweeney, unlike other scientists, actually cooperates with WADA and representatives from other enforcement bodies. He has sympathy for their cause. He just says it's hopeless. "There will come a day when they will just have to give up," he says. "This day may come in twenty years, but it will come."
There is a parallel from the past to the whole issue of performance-enhancing drugs, a parallel related to what used to be another substance that was unwanted in sports: money. Some followers of the Olympic movement may not yet fully understand that almost all participants are paid professionals. There has never been any solemn announcement that the beloved concept of amateurism - athletes competing purely for the love of sport - is no longer valid. But over time, the changed reality was accepted. And as for the top athletes making money from under the table payments? The public doesn't care, and the ideal of amateurism has passed away, has become obsolete and unenforceable.
One of the last things Pound said to me hinted that he, too, knows that WADA's mission has an expiration date. He wondered if genetic enhancements might not ultimately benefit athletes. "If you strengthen the muscle to three times its normal strength, what happens when you race? Does the muscle tear over the bone?"
Pound seems to have taken a liking to this seeping image. He paused, then developed the idea. "It could have been nice if it had happened," he said. "Then the supervision was built in." *
The human genome - the moral aspect
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~807988403~~~47&SiteName=hayadan
