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 SEVEN weeks ago, Tour de France winner Floyd Landis confessed to doping. Last week, he accused cycling hero Lance Armstrong of it as well.
Erythropoietin (EPO), evidently, was one of the drugs abused. This hormone increases the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, so the muscles get more oxygen, thus boosting endurance.
But repeated EPO injections are needed for sustained effect. Not so with Repoxygen, a preparation containing a virus modified to deliver the human EPO gene into target cells. Since that gene becomes irreversibly incorporated into the athlete’s genome, the need for repeated EPO shots is obviated. Cells that take up the gene then produce more erythropoietin “naturally”.
Repoxygen may already be circulating on the black market. In 2006, German police found an e-mail on the computer of a famous athletics coach complaining about how “difficult it is to get hold of Repoxygen. Please give me new instructions so that I can get (it) for Christmas”. The case is still before
the courts.
Transferring genetic material to improve athletic performance is fast becoming possible, what with 239 fitness genes already identified. One of these injected into muscle was found to have increased the strength of “Schwarzenegger mice” by 60 per cent. Another turned rodents into “marathon mice” that ran 90 per cent further.
Once a transferred gene is incorporated, it generally cannot be switched off. The genome, now permanently changed, then directs one’s cellular machinery to produce specific proteins. These proteins would be exactly like the “natural” ones produced in someone born with the gene.
Consider Eero Maentyranta, a Finn who won seven medals over four Winter Olympics. In 1993, the cross-country skier was discovered to have a mutated EPO gene that gave his blood 50 per cent higher oxygen-carrying capacity than others. If such a gene from the lottery of life is acceptable, why not by an injection?
In 2004, however, the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) prohibited all genetic modifications in athletes. Calling this “doping”, Wada outlawed it although it did not then, and still does not, have any efficient method of detecting such modifications.
As University of the West of Scotland ethicist Andy Miah suggests in Genetically Modified Athletes, banning such an athlete amounts to genetic discrimination. The United Nations Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights states: “No one shall be subjected to discrimination based on genetic characteristics...”
A genetically modified athlete could argue before the Court of Arbitration in Sport that such a ban infringes his “fundamental freedom” guaranteed under the Declaration to pursue his athletic career.
That its ban could be considered genetic discrimination might have been an oversight on Wada’s part. This may be because it perceives the ethical issues evoked to be no different from conventional doping. However, the latter involves foreign chemicals being introduced into the body to stimulate new cell growth. By contrast, “gene doping” merely introduces coded information that cannot work on its own. Rather, the body’s own cellular machinery must express that new information by synthesising proteins.
Thus gene doping “tricks” the body into expressing a “natural” biological response to the upgraded DNA information. Yet this was precisely Wada’s justification for not banning “altitude tents”. These tents simulate high altitude, low oxygen conditions to “deceive” the body into producing more red cells. In 2006, Wada found the tents to merely evoke a “natural” body response to low oxygen conditions.
Suppose gene therapy becomes as safe as a flu vaccine, a likelihood in our lifetime, so that hand and foot size, say, could be genetically enhanced risk-free. A goalkeeper’s body would then grow hands and feet as large as his genome would allow. Is that unnatural? If so, why?
Sport is not just about the laws of physics – or biology – but also involves aesthetic elements. These elements, in turn, tend to evoke atavistic reflexes about the natural and its opposite.
But how to define the natural body, and therefore when “natural” limits have been transgressed, are open questions. South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, sprints on carbon fibre blades. In 2008, the so-called Blade Runner was disallowed from competing against able-bodied Olympians because the blades supposedly gavehim an unfair mechanical advantage.
Yet his fastest 100 metres is 10.91 seconds, compared to world record holder Usain Bolt’s 9.58 seconds. Perhaps the authorities thought that a cyborg running alongside “natural” athletes might discomfit viewers.
All this suggests that boundaries between natural and unnatural are not stable. Instead, it is the major sports regulatory bodies that inscribe these (often arbitrary) distinctions. Now that the athlete’s genome may be irreversibly modified, the regulatory bodies have cut the Gordion knot of the novel ethical issues that the genetic procedure raises by simply criminalising the procedure in sports. Only a test case in the courts will resolve the issue.
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