Over the past decade professional sports has had its ups and downs. Even with all the goods things sports do for the common people there come the bads. Steroids, player arrests, and questionable activity are hurting our favorite sports and teams. Even with all of these threats none are as potentially devastating as gene doping.
Gene doping is defined as “the non-therapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or of the modulation of gene expression, having the capacity to improve athletic performance” and has already been banned. When you mess with genes you can enhance anything from extra red blood cells to help with endurance to more muscle mass to become stronger. The background for this comes from gene therapy a technique that we have been using for decades. In gene therapy the idea is to insert genes that might be missing naturally or could be damaged by diseases like hemophilia. Scientists and doctors would literally put the gene needed into a modified virus, and the virus would take it to the cell. At first it was meant to help cure illnesses and diseases, but it is now being used for enhance athletes. People began to realize that by adding genes that fortify muscle and bone mass they could improve strength and endurance. Experiments have been conducted on animals with amazing results.
Dr. Sweeny professor and chairman of physiology at the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicineran experiments on mice and tried to increase muscle mass. He observed that when a certain protein called IGF-1 was interacting with muscle tissue the muscle grew. He figured that if he could find the gene responsible for producing IGF-1 he could increase muscle mass. He took the gene responsible for IGF-1 production and added it to a modified virus that would have no ill-effects on the mouse and injected the virus into the leg muscles. As they where making observations they noticed that as the mice aged they kept the muscle mass and strength into their old age. On top of that the young mice with the newly added gene became stronger and more muscular. The young mice didn’t even have to exercise to get grown the crazy amount of muscle that they did, and when they did go through some sort of exercise regiment the results where doubled again. There have also been experiments similar to Dr. Sweeny’s where endurance and other attributes were enhanced. Experiments like the “mighty mice” experiments I just described show what is possible. The next step is trying to move up to humans.
While it is still a work in progress gene doping could hurt professional sports greatly by changing the way we look at the players that we always put on pedestals and admire. No longer will athletes be natural and could soon be supped up physical specimens. When looking at the meaning of sports, now a days it’s about natural talent and hard work to be in the playing shape that these athletes are now. Gene doping would ruin that. As we’ve seen with steroids the athletes will be seen as cheaters and not as cool as me might think.
Another problem would be that it is extremely hard to test for so we wouldn’t even know if an athlete did tamper with his or her genes. It would require a surgery, a biopsy, before each competition to test for any differences and even then it could be possible that it could be natural. Mutations happen all the time sometime with no ill-effect, but every once in a while a mutation could give a human and advantage. One example would be Eero Mantyranta a Finnish cross skier who won two gold metals in 1964. Years after his Olympic experience scientists found a mutation in his family that gave him a higher than normal amount of red blood cells that carry oxygen. That in turn gave him incredible endurance that was obviously an advantage over his Olympic opponents. In cases like Eero’s how would you know if he or she is natural or doped up?
It’s these problems that could be the downfall of sports as we know them today. Are we going to give in and let athletes become supped up behemoths or are we going to crack down on them and keep the tradition and hard work that it takes to be a professional athlete. With gene doping anyone could be and athlete with little work and I do not see how that could have a positive outlook on the future of sports.
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