These Olympics have already seen a marathon of drug tests, with some athletes banned for testing positive for illegal substances, some who disputed positive test results and others accused who've never failed a drug test. But as this ScienCentral News video reports, when gene therapy goes mainstream, today could seem like the good old days.
DNA Dope
Training six hours a day to compete in Athens, U.S. wrestler Kerry McCoy says being drug-free is more important to him than winning.
"You really shouldn't need anything else, and that's just kinda the way I've governed myself and that's the way I hope everyone in sports would do it," McCoy says.
But University of Pennsylvania gene therapy researcher Lee Sweeney says his studies on mice convinced him that athletes may soon be tempted to tamper with their own DNA. His lab demonstrated that increasing the amount of a single gene in mice can enhance their muscle size, strength and ability to repair injuries. Because humans also have this gene, called IGF-1, Sweeney is working on developing the treatment for muscular dystrophy, but worries that it could easily be used for "gene doping."
"We're creating genes that make substances that never leave the muscle, so nothing's in the blood, nothing's in the urine," says Sweeney. "The only way you could detect it would be to go take a biopsy of the muscle. So it would be undetectable given the current regulations, given the fact that they can't sample anything other than blood or urine. You'd actually have to get a piece of the muscle to realize that we'd actually introduced a new gene or new genetic material into it."
image: New England Journal of Medicine
Then there are those who inherit natural genetic enhancements, like the super-muscular baby born in Germany. The boy lacks a gene called myostatin that would normally limit muscle growth. "We don't know how rare the mutation is, this is the first reported case," says Se-Jin Lee, molecular genetics and biology professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who reported on the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. "I imagine going forward from here there'll be many, many more people identified with mutations." Lee's lab first discovered the mutation in 1997 when they genetically engineered "mighty mice" that lacked the myostatin gene. They also found a naturally-occurring example of it in "double-muscled" beef cattle.
Sweeney, who wrote in the July issue of Scientific American about the "natural advantage" the myostatin mutation provides, says as this knowledge becomes widespread, athletes who don't have such mutations could argue that they need genetic enhancements to compete with those who do. "I think as this becomes more widely known that athletes are competing against people who have naturally occurring mutations that are clearly a genetic advantage to them, that they're going to say that this gene enhancement or gene doping is not an unfair thing," he says.
Sweeney and other genetics researchers are in ongoing discussions with anti-doping officials to anticipate gene doping methods and devise ways to detect their use. Meanwhile, Olympian Kerry McCoy's position on the matter is clear: "If someone wants to take a shortcut by doing something that's not legal or not moral, that's unfortunate. It's a disadvantage to the sport and disadvantage to the athlete, because their experience is really cheapened by not getting the full amount out of themselves."
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