Tech | August 03, 2008 | 23 comments

Beijing: the first genetically modified Olympics?

source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/34225/description/Finding_the_Golden_Genes

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JanforGore
"The curtain will rise on what many experts believe could prove to be the first genetically modified Olympics.

For the unscrupulous or overdriven Olympic athlete, the banned practice of doping by taking hormones or other drugs to enhance athletic prowess may seem so last century. The next thing in doping is more profound and more dangerous. It called gene doping: permanently inserting strength- or endurance-boosting genes into DNA.

Once you put that gene in, it's there for the rest of that person's life, says Larry Bowers, a clinical chemist at the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in Colorado Springs, Colo. You can't go back and fish it out.

Scientists developed the technology behind gene doping as a promising way to treat genetic diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and the bubble boy immune deficiency syndrome. This experimental medical technology called gene therapy has begun to emerge from the pall of early failures and fatalities in clinical trials. As gene therapy begins to enjoy some preliminary successes, scientists at the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees drug testing for the Olympics, have started to worry that dopers might now see abuse of gene therapy in sport as a viable option, though the practice was banned by WADA in 2003.

Gene therapy has now broken out from what seemed to be too little progress and has now shown real therapies for a couple diseases, and more coming, says Theodore Friedmann, a gene therapy expert at the University of California, San Diego and chairman of WADA's panel on gene doping.

While gene therapy research has begun making great strides, the science of detecting illicit use of gene therapy in sport is only now finding its legs. To confront the perceived inevitability of gene doping, Friedmann and other scientists have started in recent years to explore the problem of detecting whether an athlete has inserted a foreign gene an extra copy that may be indistinguishable from the natural genes into his or her DNA.

It's proving to be a formidable challenge. Genetic makeup varies from person to person, and world-class athletes are bound to have some natural genetic endowments that other people lack. Somehow, gene-doping tests must distinguish between natural genetic variation among individuals and genes inserted artificially and the distinction must stand up in court.

Scientists are fighting genetics with genetics, so to speak, enlisting the latest technologies for gene sequencing or for profiling the activity of proteins to find the telltale signs of gene doping. Some techniques attempt the daunting search for the foreign gene itself, like looking for a strand of hay in an enormous haystack."

This is what living in a culture of greed, competition, and winning above all instead of fairness and loving what you do is doing to people. Even to the point of inserting this foreign DNA and not knowing for sure what it will do to your body. So we eat genetically modified food (without our knowledge) and now can genetically modify our own bodies all to profit those who don't care about the affects this is having on us... and athletes that are women who do this and get pregnant afterwards ... what risks would their children now face? Is winning and $$$ and endorsements REALLY all that important? So what will the new trend be: Bodies by Monsanto?
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23 comments // Beijing: the first genetically modified Olympics?

  • stopnoise
    • 0
      stopnoise  

    • One thing I know in this Olympiads like the others, America and the World will be out of its mind and our internal problems will be alienated for the time being. Do not get me wrong, I like athletic competitions but people, especially the kids should be aware that these are not normal individuals and real life cannot be based on their physical achievements. Are you getting my point?

    • 3 years ago
  • Mafioso
    • 0
      Mafioso  

    • Nothing new... They've (sports labs) have been developing these advances for years. If you look up patents for some of the implements used in these procedures, you will see that effective medicine (yes some medicine is actually effective) goes to shit like this.

      Meanwhile people are dying from cancer, AIDS, alzheimers, and other ailments, maybe not as much as before, but with advances like this it makes you wonder why.

      Although some of the advances do contain altered genes, for the most part, genes that naturally occur in the bodies are the main components, which is what makes these advances hard to detect, and eventually will make them become the norm in the future.

    • 3 years ago
  • jubal
    • 0
      jubal  

    • This is what you get for paying people millions of dollars to throw, kick, or hit a ball around. The Billions of dollars that represent professional sports and the intense competition is ripe for this kind of manipulation; to win at all costs.

      Why can't scientists be treated as good as athletes?

    • 3 years ago
  • JanforGore
  • ocanada
    • 0
      ocanada  

    • For anyone dealing with an otherwise uncurable or even untreatable genetic ailment, gene therapy isn't so black and white, or creepy as has been said here. I will admit that there is a level of moral terpitude that it undermines, I don't advocate its use to promote eugenics, or for amplifying or changing basic human attributes such as strength, endurance, or how we age, but to cure illness than it will give hope and quality of life back to scores of millions. The question isn't whether the practice will continue, the question is how to ethicaly research its implimentation.

      Its strange to see this occuring within a lifetime. I doubt anyone in the last few years would have thought that we'd be seeing geneticaly modified athletes at this years Olympics although now I think I can predict what Baseballs next scandal is going to be.

      Thanks for posting this Jan !

    • 3 years ago
  • jubal
    • 0
      jubal  
    • ocanada:

      To me the only good use of genetic research should be to extend our lifetimes so we can live thousands of years, not a mere 60 to 100.

      Death is a genetic program that must be rewritten or reprogrammed.

    • 3 years ago
  • jjmaster
  • jubal
    • 0
      jubal  
    • Image

    • Read this book and you will get a clue to where this is all heading. This woman is much like "Dark Angel" that was a series on television a while back.

      This woman is genetically enhanced; hearing, smell, eyes, taste, strength, intelligence, and she has a big secret. She can reproduce when genetically cloned humans are not allowed to reproduce. Everybody wants to get a hold of her and use her for their own evil purposes, but she has plans of her own.

      This story is so prophetic that it predicted the internet, the elevator to a geostationary platform, moon bases, human mars exploration, cloning, bioengineering, multinational corporations that are as powerful as countries and basically countries unto themselves, fascist Christian government in the US, the US fracturing into several countries based on ideologies; and more.

      See for yourself, it comes in an audio book as well as paperback.

    • 3 years ago
  • Vierotchka
  • JanforGore
  • JanforGore
  • JanforGore
  • Vierotchka
  • jubal
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  
    • JanforGore:

      Don't know. Hackers? I had the tags "gene doping" and "enviroment" there when I first posted this, and then looked and they were gone so I placed them back. It's a mystery to me.

    • 3 years ago
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  

    • Yes, Megan, and in the case of Bejing, I will be more than happy to boycott them. Honestly on the whole, I don't even enjoy watching sports anymore. Too much about popularity and money as opposed to actually doing it for love of the game. To even now think olympic athletes would even consider this just tells us how far humanity is going down. And we won't then know if any of them did this anymore than we know for sure what we eat on a daily basis and what it may be doing to us. What's next? People genetically modifying their children when they don't meet their expectations? This world is certainly f^^^^^ed up.

    • 3 years ago
  • MeganMcKenzie
    • 0
      MeganMcKenzie  

    • It is terrifying as next we will probably have genetically altered military.

      I suppose it is anti-social but I am to the point of asking what is the point of the Olympics anymore? I think somewhere along the last 20 years the Olympics have brought out the worst in so many.

    • 3 years ago
  • queenofit
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  

    • Me too. And it is this atmosphere that winning is all there is that I am sure would be the main reason for doing this. How could someone risk changing their DNA makeup just to win a race? Whatever happened to the higher ideals and inspiration of winning based on your own natural abilities due to hard work? And the psychological effects of this disturb me... to know you only win because you enhanced yourself... that I suppose is OK to some as long as the $$$$$$ is there? My greatest concern is the genes then passed onto children. Do we really know enough about this to not believe there would be problems?

    • 3 years ago
  • Vierotchka
    • 0
      Vierotchka  

    • Now, what this might or might not do to the athletes who chose to have this done is one thing, but what it might to to their progeny and posterity is what I find profoundly disturbing.

    • 3 years ago
  • JanforGore
  • shroomfairy
  • Vierotchka
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