Medical breakthroughs cause ethical issues for sports, athletes

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Posted 12:44PM on Thursday, March 21, 2002

NEW YORK - If athletes thought they could gain an edge by rubbing frogs on their noses, they'd carry around tiny toads. Athletes are superstitious, sometimes gullible, always looking for an advantage. By nature, they push limits, take chances. More than a few cross the line into cheating, ignoring rules and health risks. Some wrestlers, figure skaters and gymnasts starve themselves, at times to death, to shed weight. Some football players, baseball sluggers and weightlifters pump themselves up with pills and potions. Soon the stakes and the temptations will be raised. The time is coming when anabolic steroids, banned supplements, blood-boosting drugs - all the tricks in the sports cheaters' bag these days - will seem primitive. Injections and pills will become passe. Gene expression will be all the rage. Athletes might start talking about mitochondria. A few years down the road in the full flourish of the genetic age, a gene here and a gene there will help build muscles, make bones stronger, enhance endurance, block out pain. Designer babies, their genes altered in the womb to create champions, may be further away but no less possible. The future looms with all kinds of wonderful technologies that carry the promise of revolutionizing medicine, overcoming diseases and crippling injuries. At the same time, their misuse in healthy athletes to help them perform better threatens the concept of a level playing field in sports. Implants of microchips and cell-sized devices might allow athletes to jump higher or farther or lift more weight. Laser surgery already can give a half-blind person 20-20 vision. If something comes along that enables people to see two or three times better, athletes might line up for it. Is one OK and the other not? Breakthroughs are inevitable and so are abuses, and the issues facing the sports world are matters of ethics as much as they are of science. Trying to get a jump on the problems ahead, the World Anti-Doping Agency this week brought together leaders in biology, genetics and sports medicine, along with policy makers and legal experts to start looking at the genetic enhancement of athletic performance. Cynics might say it's a waste of time and money to try to stay ahead of all the ways athletes will find to cheat. Maybe sports should be open to all comers, whatever their performance-enhancing preference. There are even those who say genetic enhancement is good since it can help level the playing field for people born without the body of, say, a Michael Jordan. The cynics would be wrong. At stake are the very definitions of fair play and human endeavor. If we do not want a world where some athletes are bioengineered and others are not, we cannot ignore the implications of the new sciences. If we cherish honest victory and defeat, we cannot turn away from the challenge of ensuring them. The WADA conference is a good start to stop genetic cheating before it gets going, though right now there are more questions than answers. When does therapy for an injury or illness cross over into performance enhancement? What constitutes misuse? What codes of conduct should guide researchers and doctors? How can rules against genetic enhancement be enforced? Who will make the rules? Scientists are aware of about 500 genetic therapy trials involving humans. No one knows what might be going on in garages and the medical underground. ``It's a grave new world,'' Dr. Gary I. Wadler of the New York University School of Medicine said Wednesday at the end of the conference. ``The potential exists over the next 25 years for the real perversion of enormous advances in technology.'' No one should doubt how far athletes and their coaches will go to gain that edge. Even if it costs tens of millions of dollars to thwart genetic cheating, as it probably will, the Olympics and other sports cannot afford not to do it. If they get behind on this, as they did with drugs over the past three decades, they might never catch up. The prospects of genetic enhancement brings to mind the story of Hugo Danner, the football-playing hero of Philip Wylie's novel ``Gladiator,'' published back in 1930. Injected with a serum when he was growing in his mother's womb, he discovered at age 10 that he could jump 40 feet into the air and run like an express train. Hugo Danner, an inspiration for the comic-book ``Superman'' a few years later, may still be just the stuff of science fiction. Then again, maybe not.