Olympic Doping Debate: Is Genetic Enhancement Fair?

Here’s a peek at the Summer Olympics of the future: a swimmer racing with surgically lengthened arms, widened nostrils (for more efficient breathing), and enlarged webbing between his fingers. Sounds scary, right? Not to Andy Miah, who teaches bioethics at the University of the West of Scotland and outlined this exact scenario in a Washington Post op-ed this past Sunday, calling it “only natural.”

Enhancing ourselves is only human, Miah argues, even if it requires surgery or genetic modifications. After all, the early Greeks ate mushrooms to improve their sports prowess, Miah says. “We need to abolish our current anti-doping rules and embrace a performance policy that recognizes the merit of using human enhancements,” writes Miah. 

Genetic manipulation is already getting attention in Beijing. In late July, a German TV journalist posed as an Olympic coach and reported that a doctor in China offered to sell him a stem-cell treatment. Such “gene doping,” a technique in which an athlete’s cells are altered with virus-carrying genes or other performance-enhancing changes that might last a lifetime, is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. (Check out this info-graphic from Science News to see how it sometimes works.)

Essentially using the same techniques as risky gene therapy (such as those that caused the death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, and leukemia in a handful of children treated for the deadly “bubble boy disease”), gene doping is the newest concern in terms of performance enhancement because it’s nearly impossible to detect.

For another take on Miah’s bold argument, I called up Ronald M. Green, an ethicist and author of the 2007 book, Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice. “Biochemical or genetic interventions to win Olympic gold are a bad idea,” he tells me.

He offers two reasons. First, if athletes engage in gene doping to seek a “positional” advantage (i.e., to beat out everyone else), “then all competitors will be drawn into a genetic arms race for the top.” That leads to the second problem: safety. Because genetic doping techniques are only a few years old, their long-term, or even medium-term, effects are unknown.

But Green does not believe that genetic enhancement should be banned to maintain the “integrity of sport.” “The idea that sports is all about pure effort is poppycock,” says Green. “Sports is the domain of genetic inequality.”

In his book, for example, Green points out that Lance Armstrong has exceptional genetic endowments, such as extra-long femur bones and lungs that are extraordinarily good at processing oxygen; yet no one describes his “natural” advantages as unfair, even though Armstrong won them through the gene lottery of birth.

Because some people are naturally gifted and others are not, Green envisions a world where gene therapies are used to level the playing field. As gene modification therapies become safer, more effective, and more universal, Green predicts, “More parents are going to opt for genetic abilities for their kids,” whether that modification takes place in the prenatal stage or later. Parents may choose therapies that allow a child to overcome abnormal shortness or lack of coordination, so the child can “play [sports] at a respectable level.”

Well, that’s an entirely different ethical question (and use of technology). Gene doping involves the genetic modification of an adult’s cells that could possibly last for an individual’s lifetime (but is not passed on to one’s children). Prenatal genetic modification would change every cell in an infant’s body, and could possibly be passed on to the next generation. And performing gene doping on children begs the question of informed consent—do parents have the right to make lifelong changes in their offspring’s genes?

If Green is right, my own sons may face questions completely foreign to me when starting their own families. By then, some 20-plus years from now, maybe prenatal genetic treatment will be as routine as LASIK. Will I have any insights to offer? How do any of us weigh the moral and health implications of this brave new world?

As experts grapple with this, I’m watching closely. On the Olympic stage, international attention gives us the opportunity to think seriously about something that, like swimmers with webbed fingers, seems too strange or creepy to be true, but could be our future.

This post has been updated since it was originally published.

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(PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES)