27 October 2005
Gene Doping Might Make Steroids Obsolete in Sports, Expert Says
New performance-enhancing treatment could be more difficult to detect
The following article appears in the October 2005 issue of the State Department's electronic journal Economic Perspectives. It is based on an op-ed article published in The Boston Globe and other newspapers but has been revised and updated for this publication by the author. The complete issue, titled The Promise of Biotechnology, can be viewed on the USINFO Web site.
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THE RACE AGAINST GENE DOPING
By Huntington F. Willard, Director
Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Vice Chancellor for Genome Sciences, Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina
In the last few years, public discussion of performance-enhancing drug usage in sports has reached a fever pitch. After swearing to the U.S. Congress in March 2005 that he had never used steroids, Baltimore Oriole baseball player Rafael Palmeiro, a one-time certainty for the Baseball Hall of Fame, was given a 10-game suspension in August. His transgression? A positive test for steroids. Earlier leaked grand jury testimony in an investigation into a San Francisco laboratory appeared to implicate several other high-profile ballplayers and track and field stars in steroid usage. Elsewhere, anti-doping officials regularly test competitive cyclists and sanction those who test positive for drug use. A recent retrospective test of 70 urine samples from the 1998 Tour de France found 40 to be positive for EPO, a hormone that promotes the formation of red blood cells and can increase stamina. No reliable test for EPO was available in 1998.
For all of the recent headlines about anabolic steroid usage in American football and synthetic hormone usage in European cycling, high-tech gene doping may soon have the dubious honor of rendering them obsolete. Commissioner of the National Football League Paul Tagliabue, appearing before Congress barely a month after Palmeiro issued his denial, said as much: “When [gene doping] happens, the [drug doping] issues that our society is discussing today ... will be as irrelevant as the blacksmith in the automobile age.”
Gene doping, the nontherapeutic use of DNA and/or cells to enhance athletic performance, has the potential to offer the cheater a “souped-up,” or supercharged, body that can run faster and jump higher but whose modifications are virtually undetectable. If an athlete injects himself with additional copies of a gene already present in his body, how is one to distinguish the original from the copy? Only an expensive and invasive muscle biopsy could detect the presence of a slightly altered synthetic gene.
We know that a high proportion of our physical prowess is hardwired in our genomes. A recent study of young adult males undergoing cycle training suggested that as many as 500 genes and DNA markers scattered across the genome may be associated with athletic performance and health-related fitness. Mice lacking the myostatin gene, for example, tend to develop huge muscles, the result of more and bigger muscle fibers -- these rodents have been nicknamed “Schwarzenegger mice.” How many body builders could resist that?
As with other doping methods, the safety issues surrounding gene doping should be enough to give athletes pause. Abuse of EPO, for example, can have devastating consequences. EPO can thicken the blood to such an extent that it will cause heart failure, especially in elite athletes whose resting heart rates tend to be extraordinarily slow. Not long after the arrival of EPO in cycling, 18 Belgian and Dutch cyclists died suddenly of heart attacks. So it is fair to ask: What will the risks of EPO gene doping be once the EPO gene can be administered without fear of detection?
Some have argued that the best way to control gene doping is to legalize it. After all, they say, if Tiger Woods can have Lasik eye surgery to improve his vision to 20/10 and thereby help his golf game, why shouldn’t a cyclist be able to modify his genes? Moreover, this argument goes, by making gene doping legal and regulating it, safety standards could be imposed.
But would gene doping violate the spirit of sports? So far the official response is yes. In recent years, both the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency have added gene doping to their lists of banned substances (the International Cyclists’ Union has been strangely quiet on the subject). Whether a practical means of enforcing those bans can be developed remains to be seen.
In our competitive culture, the desire to win is ever present. In early 2005, after U.S. Major League Baseball was shamed into imposing a somewhat stricter steroid-testing regimen, the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball released the names of 41 minor league players who had failed spring-training drug tests. Remarkably, these players stayed on the “juice” (banned drugs), even though they knew they were likely going to be tested, caught, and publicly identified. And what of Palmeiro? If he knowingly took steroids, could he somehow not have known he would be instantly transformed from hero to pariah if he were caught?
Conventional doping may be going the way of the blacksmith, but there appears to be little doubt that gene doping will soon be here to stay. What will that mean for the games we play?
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(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
