The Hindu Business Line : Genetically modified athelete

INDIA hankers to be a global centre in biotechnology, and it hopes that some day the Olympics will mean more than a junket for the politicians and bureaucrats who govern our sports. With the arrival of the genetically modified athlete, things just might be begin to go India's way finally.

The word is that the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) believes that it may soon have to deal with genetically modified athletes, till now confined to science fiction. Perhaps, even at the Athens Olympics.

Early this year, Dr Lee Sweeney, who heads the research on how gene therapy can make muscles respond better to exercise, at the University of Pennsylvania, said that half the e-mails he gets are from patients suffering from muscle dystrophy and the rest from athletes and coaches.

Researchers at the university injected rats with a modified virus that transported a gene to their hind leg muscles. The gene was found to trigger an increased production of a growth hormone called IGF-I. This along with an intensive exercise of ladder climbing caused the rats' muscles to become 15 to 30 per cent stronger than what can be expected with exercises alone.

Recently, Dr Geoffrey Goldspink at the University College Medical School in London announced that he had developed a way to boost muscle mass in mice by introducing foreign muscle-building DNA.

The way Wada sees it, if there are `Schwarzenegger mice' running around labs, it is not unlikely to find them running around at the Athens Olympics.

Genetic enhancements are banned under international sporting rules but that doesn't mean a thing. Genetic modifications leave no trace in the blood or urine, and can be detected only through muscle biopsy.

Dr Sweeney says, "Given current testing, athletes would be able to get away with it. They would have to change the testing mechanism." He adds that genetic researchers may, therefore, have to design their treatments so as to make them susceptible to discovery.

But not everybody shares Wada's concerns.

Dr Andy Miah is the author of Genetically Modified Athletes: Biomedical Ethics, Gene Doping and Sport, published by Routledge. In an article in The Observer (August 1), he made thought-provoking arguments against the condemnation of genetic modification of athletes. Dr Miah writes, "What should be our reaction to genetically modified athletes? "Are we right to call them `cheats'? Are we justified to ban them from playing sport? What if people are born genetically modified - would they be allowed to play sport? What if I am less genetically gifted than another athlete - should I be permitted to use gene doping to cancel out my disadvantage? And what about if I have been injured while participating in sport - would I be allowed to use gene therapy to quicken the process of repair? These questions reveal that there is much more at stake here than just the ethics of sport and some fanciful notion of fair play or the `natural' athlete." He asserts that sport needs genetic modification to shed light on the inadequacy of current anti-doping policies.

"The ethical basis of anti-doping has not been revised or questioned since it began in the 1960s. Sport has changed radically since then and technology is now integral to an athlete's achievement. But why are ethical debates about technical equipment and doping entirely separate in the world of sport? The use of altitude chambers is a good example to show how complicated these discussions are. Why are these chambers permitted? How are they different from practices on the prohibited doping-methods list?"

The problem, Dr Miah says, is that Wada has already characterised genetic modification as a form of doping.

"But we would be far better off by permitting genetic modification in sport. It promises safer methods of enhancing performance than the use of synthetic drugs. This is a technology that athletes could learn to use effectively and safely and that would offer them far greater control over their bodies."

In his article, Dr Miah concedes that the issue of genetically modified athletes issue is "rife with controversy and emotion" - but, he points out that "we need to replace these superficial impressions with considered understanding about how these technologies would be used."

Genetic enhancement, he observes, can make us more robust, more capable and better humans. Genetically modified athletes might actually arise from just trying to make healthier people and it would be wrong not to pursue this technology. Sport will just have to find ways of integrating such people.

GM, he concludes, "asks us to question what it means to be human."

"Nobody said that this is going to be easy to deal with. It challenges fundamental assumptions about our place in the world and our influence on nature. Yet sport needs to realise that a moral crusade is misplaced. Permitting gene modification is not `giving up' on sport ethics. It does not mean endorsing drugs. It is an assertion of our inherent, technological identity. We stand to gain a lot and we lose very little. We have played God for centuries... ."

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