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DESIGNER ATHLETES: AN ESSAY ON HUMAN GENETIC ENGINEERING FIRST GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FISH AND MAMMALS: ARE ATHLETES NEXT? WILL GENETICALLY ENGINEERED DESIGNER ATHLETES SIGNAL THE END OF SPORTS? The pervasive drug scandals surrounding the top major league baseball stars like Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi have led prominent writers to question whether we are seeing the end of sports. But steroids are only the latest scandal in the slippery slope to genetic engineering of athletes. Unless a way is found to stop genetic engineering of athletes, then amateur and professional sport competitions as we know them are doomed. Imagine trying to compete against someone who has been engineered to have gorilla-like strength. The joys and human interest in comparisons with records of achievement over time will be rendered meaningless. At the start of 2004 press coverage of the tragic life of East German women athletes revealed that decades ago government officials dosed very young girls with performance enhancing drugs without their knowledge. A decade later, in the early 1980s these girls went on Olympic gold medals. Today these women in their late 30s are struggling with their sexual identity and living in bodies ruined by steroids. The Olympic games in Athens this past summer produced major embarrassments for the host country, as some of its top athletes such as Tyler Hamilton tested positive for performance boosting drugs. As the results of the drug scandal involving the San Francisco area company BALCO became known, many prominent athletes have come under scrutiny. But this tragic recent history of scandals pales in comparison to what is in store if gene enhancements become available. Gene doping is less detectable because the chemicals involved may well be indistinguishable from their natural counterparts, and a urine or blood test won’t be able to uncover any damning evidence. Lee Sweeney, chairman of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine wrote in Scientific American last July: “the world may be about to watch one of its last Olympic Games without genetically enhanced athletes.” Sweeney is developing gene therapy to deal with muscular dystrophy in the aging population and foresees that once genetic treatments are in widespread use for this disease, there will be great difficulty in preventing the genetic muscle enhancements from being used by athletes. Many top athletes have demonstrated their willingness to throw ethical considerations to the wind in order to win, even if the drugs posed life-threatening risks to their health. At the same time coaches under severe pressure to win give in or look the other way. Gene therapy can then be taken a step further with designer baby athletes. Many parents will want to give their kids a special boost in strength or speed via the insertion of inheritable traits. What happens when such inheritable genes are put in? What choice will a kid engineered this way have? What will families without genetically enhanced athletes do about sports? Will they even want to risk their kids playing with super-strong, designer kids spawned by their neighbors? Some cynics argue that there is no way to stop this, but those of us who love to play and watch sports ought to make every effort to promote laws and a code of sports ethics with strong prohibitions against “designer athletes”. These must go beyond today’s prohibitions against performance enhancing drugs so that they outlaw the high-tech cheating that would be possible with gene doping. If we don’t, it’s the end of much of sports as we know it. That would be a tragedy for humanity. Author Dr. Brent Blackwelder is president of Friends of the Earth and has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ethics) from the University of Maryland (1975). |
