Life in the Fast Lane: An Introduction to Genomics Risks: Prologue: >Newspapers around the world picked up a story that came out of a session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Seattle in February of 2004. The story reported on the results of a scientific study in which a virus carrying the gene for a growth hormone called IGF-1 was injected into the hind-leg muscles of rats. The rats were then put through an aggressive physical-training program, whereupon the targeted muscles grew between 15-30% in both size and strength, in comparison with a control group of untreated animals. The higher levels of IGF-1 occurred in the muscle tissue, but not in the bloodstream. There is the hope that someday a gene therapy program might be developed for humans suffering from muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy.
So why the heavy media coverage of a rat study? The answer is contained in a remark made at the time by Lee Sweeney, the study's lead researcher: "Half of the e-mails I get are from patients, and the other half are from athletes." The prospect of gaining a quick advantage over others in competitive sports using gene therapy is irresistible to some -- especially because current anti-doping tests on athletes could not detect this kind of modification. The fact that this particular therapy has undergone no human safety testing is apparently a trivial point: The dark stories about health damage in later life to the athletes of the former East German communist regime, who were treated by their own government as experimental laboratory animals, appear to hold no terrors for them. The great irony is, of course, that every incremental step in the technological enhancement of performance acts as a spur for the next one. The cycle recurs with increasing rapidity as the rate of innovation grows, as the benefits of newer techniques leapfrog those of their predecessors.
Before too long a great flood of experimental gene therapies will be pouring out of the world's research laboratories. In the not-too-distant future the results of athletic competitions may reflect nothing so much as the differential risk tolerance among individuals for trying out the latest innovations in mixing various therapies. The trophies will recognize those with the courage to live life in the fast lane -- for that day. What comes after is anybody's guess.<
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posted by johannes,
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
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