Posted on 08/04/2002 9:28:14 PM PDT by Tribune7
Ageless athlete may not be far off
Penn's research into a synthetic gene has wide implications for sports.
By Frank Fitzpatrick
Inquirer Staff Writer
You know all those steroid-laced sluggers, blood-doped swimmers, and hormonally enhanced weightlifters who people worry are ruining sports?
They're just minor-league fears.
The real nightmare is lurking inside tiny cages in a University of Pennsylvania basement.
There, genetically engineered mice and rats, some of them the equivalent of 80-year-old humans, display rippling, well-toned muscles that neither aging nor a lack of exercise can diminish.
Injected only once with a synthetic gene created by researchers in Penn's physiology department, these ripped rodents are as much as 60 percent stronger than untreated ones. When injured, they recover with remarkable speed. And their muscles don't weaken with age.
"The muscle properties of the mice really never changed from when they were young to as old as we could get them," said Dr. H. Lee Sweeney, who heads the Penn study, funded by the National Institutes of Health. "The potential for its use in athletics is very high. Combined with a normal training protocol, athletes will get more out of their work, will recover from injury more quickly, and... the number of years they will be competitive will increase immensely."
Imagine Barry Bonds winning another home-run title at 50. Or Michael Johnson ascending an Olympic medals stand at 60.
So far, only mice and rats have been treated in the three-year-old Penn program. Sweeney hopes to turn to dogs this year. And perhaps then, because the aim of his work all along has been to reduce muscle-weakening in the elderly, humans.
If the gene's effect is the same in men as it is in mice, the implications could be enormous for sports, many of them already tainted by speculation about drug-cheating.
Sweeney's research, and similar studies in England, Australia and elsewhere, is speeding up the timetables for those concerned about genetic engineering. Once considered a distant possibility, experts now say these designer-athletes could turn up at the next Olympic Games, just two summers from now in Athens.
"I've already gotten lots of calls from weightlifters and other athletes who had heard about this," Sweeney said. "I even heard from one high school football coach who wanted me to inject his entire team."
These altered bodies would bear no telltale signs and could contain synthetic genes that improve not only an athlete's muscle strength, but also his stamina, vision and reflexes.
And, according to Sweeney, this kind of manipulation need not be limited to teenagers and adults. It's possible to implant these genes in embryos.
Perhaps the most vexing element of this Frankenstein scenario for world sports officials is that traditional drug-testing won't be able to detect a thing. Scientists insist the only way to find an injected gene is with a muscle biopsy, a potentially damaging procedure to which few athletes are likely to submit.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA, the drug-testing arm of the International Olympic Committee), still beset with 20th-century problems such as blood-doping and the use of growth hormones, last year convened a seminar to discuss this looming laboratory threat, one of at least five such conferences on the topic in the last 12 months.
"WADA wasn't asking the question 'if' this will happen, they were asking, 'When? How soon?' " said Sweeney, who addressed the conference. "It's doable now."
The Human Genome Project provided a genetic road map to the body. Researchers and athletes now know which athletic-enhancing functions are triggered by which of our 30,000 genes. So every time an unknown bursts onto the world stage with a remarkable performance - as happened recently with several teenage Chinese runners - the specter of genetic engineering is raised.
"It's not the kind of thing you can do in your garage at this point," Sweeney said, "but if there were a government willing to do what East Germany once did for its athletes, it could be happening now."
Penn State professor Charles Yesalis, the coeditor of the book Performance Enhancing Substances in Sport and Exercise, said geneticists around the world now believe there could be genetically altered athletes as soon as the 2004 Summer Games.
"I was at a conference in Europe, and these same people who several years ago predicted that we wouldn't see it any earlier than 2010, then revised that to 2008, are now saying look out for Athens," Yesalis said.
With genetic engineering for health purposes likely to win social approval, the challenge for sports will be to draw a line between legal and illegal tampering. Is it OK, for example, if an athlete undergoes gene therapy to repair a muscle injury? But is it not OK if he or she does so to prevent injury by strengthening a muscle?
"This gene manipulation is not all bad," Harri Syvasalmi, the WADA's secretary general, said last year. "We have to accept that some of these enhancements will be wonderful, especially for athletes who are injured."
There are scientific regulations in the United States and most Western nations that carefully control genetic research and limit it to the laboratory. But decades ago, how many anticipated that steroids and human-growth hormones would find their way to the baseball fields and swimming pools?
At this point, the IOC seems determined to prevent the phenomenon from further eroding the public's faith in sports.
"Gene manipulation is there to treat people with ailments," IOC president Jacques Rogge said. "I'm very clear on that."
Still, many fear that developing nations like China, where chemically enhanced swimmers were uncovered in the late 1990s, or desperately ambitious individuals in the West might take the risk, even though little is known of possible side effects.
That's because if you build a better mouse, the world will beat a path to your door.
"It changes the playing field dramatically," Sweeney said. "If we get to that point, what do we do? Say 'OK, there are no rules'?"
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The Penn study's initial aim was to explore muscle deterioration in the elderly. A virus was created that produced a synthetic version of the gene that alerts muscles to the need for repair and growth.
It does so with a substance called IGF-1 (Insulin Growth Factor-1). By injecting mice, and later rats, with the gene, Sweeney and his team ensured that the rodents' IGF-1-triggering devices would be constantly switched on.
"We thought if we kept that signal on all the time, anytime the muscle got damaged, it would repair itself faster and maybe even bigger," Sweeney said. "It turned out that with that signal turned on all the time, the animals did not get weaker as they got older. And they kept their speed as well as their strength throughout their lives."
Along the way, possible applications for treating muscular dystrophy and diseases such as diabetes were examined with encouraging results.
"In muscular dystrophy, the problem is that the muscle is damaged very easily," Sweeney said. "If we can increase the repair mechanism, we can slow the progression of it."
Still, it was the IGF-1 gene's inherent benefits to athletes that became apparent most quickly.
"They [the injected mice and rats] were more muscular," Sweeney said. "If they were on a treadmill running, the difference became very noticeable. You can see they have broad definition - broad shoulders and big hind and forelimbs. They look like weightlifters."
Athletes injected with the gene would look well-muscled and extremely fit, but wouldn't be the bloated freaks that steroids have created.
"There won't be any of that characteristic steroid look around the neck and face," Sweeney said.
And, in the rodents at least, there have been no damaging side effects.
"We haven't seen any," Sweeney said. "Of course, we know that if humans have high levels of IGF-1, it can cause cardiac problems and a number of other problems. But by having the muscle produce it within the muscle, none was getting into the blood. It was all being trapped in the muscle."
The younger the animal was injected, the more it increased its strength. Young adult mice quickly became 15 percent to 25 percent stronger and maintained that level throughout their lives, typically 21/2 years. Even those treated in middle age grew stronger, too.
The strength of one mouse, dubbed "He-Man," improved by 60 percent, and he was able to carry three times his weight.
However, it's easier to get rats to exercise than mice. With moderate treadmill and more severe weight-bearing exercises, rats showed even greater improvement than the mice, and those that had been injured recovered with almost no scar tissue.
"The exercise causes some damage, and that causes you to rebuild bigger than you'd see with exercise alone," Sweeney said.
As altruistic as the aims of these medical researchers might be, it's inevitable that athletes whose dreams can be fulfilled or broken by a few hundredths of a second will try to adapt the research to their own purposes.
"Then, I'm afraid, even the optimists who believe this war [on drug-cheating] can be won would have to admit the war has been lost," Yesalis said. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Contact Frank Fitzpatrick at 215-854-5068 or ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com.
I hardly ever read the Inquirer anymore but I caught this story.
Great, now the ESPN Stong Man Contests are gonna have to buy 3 more of everything!
Is it possible to be more shortsighted?
This comes from the Philadelphia Inquirer, remember, so the answer is actually, yes. :-)
The article, by the way, ran in the sports section.
Is it possible that clandestine research and political activity is being conducted by the elite to obtain and secure the genetic means of life extension from use by the general public?
If true, then is this containment reflected in the prohibition and regulation of stem cell research?
As far as I can discern, there seems to be a media blackout on the whole subject of life extension technology. We are at a point in history where immortality may very well be possible for people now in their teens and twenties due to the expotential growth of bio-tech and the incremental extension of their lives that would enable them to sustain life long enough to enter the vertical part of the curve.
Given the breathtaking impact of this potential on society and the planet, something seems a bit fishy about the lack of public dialog in this area.
[Pats head and discovers no metallic chapeau]
The solutions, though, when they come, would be as hard for many of us alive today to understand as the solution to the problem of witchcraft and demonic possession would have been for, say, witch-hunting minister Cotton Mather. Imagine old Cotton, fresh from the Salem trails of the 1790s, asking today's New York lawyer: "How did you finally solve the problem of witchcraft and demonic possession?"Our present-day lawyer scratches his head: "Well, finally we realized there weren't any such things as witches and demons. They were just misperceptions and personal projections—often about real estate, so history tells us—egged on by superstition." Cotton would rack him and the entire postmodern world up as nut cases.
I think, to an extent, the modern-day equivilent of demonic possession is the label of "paranoid" or "conspiracy theorist" or even "technophobe" or "anti-government". Faced with terrifying realities of technical or "systemic" (bureaucratic) advances, the majority of people are not capable of mentally grasping the immensity of the whole and its dynamics, and/or it presents problems and implications that are too terrifying and complex to be assessed.
We slip into a philosophical catatonic mentality, a bizarre negation of conciousness.
Do you see this?
Of course, this was published in the newspaper.
Well, the Philadelphia Inquirer, anyway.
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