Genetic 'Doping' Will Change Sports, Scientists Say

WASHINGTON — The use of genetic engineering to enhance athletic performance is poised to set off an "arms race" that could destroy the meaning of sports and create new dangers for children, experts said Monday.

So far, efforts to use gene therapy to treat disease have produced only a handful of successes, and the ability to install or enhance athletic skill is even further away.

But information on the connections between genes and performance is accumulating, geneticists and ethicists told congressional staff members.

Without government intervention, this will inevitably lead to the day when the illegal use of anabolic steroids and other controversial performance-enhancing strategies is replaced by a race of genetically supercharged athletes, they said.

Speed, strength and endurance — the qualities by which athletic competition defines human differences — would become the results of deliberately controlled cellular processes.

"I really don't think anybody will ever find a 'shortstop gene,' " said Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a Garrison, N.Y., institute devoted to bioethics. He said that requires too many skills — "agility, grace, soft hands and a strong throwing arm."

But, he said, interest in designing training regimes around certain genetic traits and even inserting genes for specific advantages in human beings already is growing.

For example, a Melbourne, Australia, firm markets a mail-order test for the ACTN3 gene, supposedly linked to whether a person has "fast-twitch" or "slow-twitch" muscle fibers.

For $110 Australian, Genetic Technologies Ltd. sends out a kit with instructions on how to collect DNA from inside one's mouth and mail it back to be analyzed.

The company implies on its Web page that muscles with a greater concentration of "fast-twitch" fibers might enhance an athlete's ability to participate in speed and power sports, while "slow-twitch" fibers might lead to excellence at endurance sports.

"There is no easy answer as to what makes a champion," the company says. "Many factors, including genetics, environment, psychology, diet, physiology, coaching and training programs contribute to sporting success. The ACTN3 Sports Gene Test will be a complementary aid, providing athletes with relevant information to make choices about the best event, distance or sport in which they are likely to perform at their optimum levels."

Murray said, "If you want to waste your money on this, nobody's hurt but you. But what's more troubling is if it is used to test children, who are then prematurely channeled into a particular sport."

More troubling, he said, is that as the science of genomics progresses, there is talk of using genetic engineering to insert into human beings genes responsible for traits known to be important to sports performance.

This could change the role of sports in ways society doesn't want, he said. "Superior athletes who don't want to do these things will be robbed of a choice."

Schemes to install genes that stimulate greater production of red blood cells or greater muscle growth already are being promoted, said University of California, San Diego, geneticist Theodore Friedmann.

"They're clearly hyped, they're clearly overblown, they're clearly wrong, in my opinion," he said, "but this science is inevitable, and it's not too early to think about public policy in this area."