Is gene doping the inevitable next step for Olympic cheats?
Gary Wadler
Adviser, World Anti-Doping Agency
The question is not if but when. Will it happen in Beijing? Maybe. Will it be a problem in the 2012 games? I'd say yes. The history of doping has proven that every major advance in science is followed by people's perverting that science and using it for cheating. Athletes are already reaching out for this sort of intervention.
Bill McKibben
Author, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age
It may be the next step, and if it is, it will wreck sports forever. And in so doing, it will provide a pretty good analogy for what human genetic engineering will do to human meaning in general. As soon as a footrace becomes a test of who had the better chromosomal implant in embryo, it will be a test of machinery pure and simple - not of any of the qualities we associate with achievement. The success and failure of those athletes will carry all the glory and drama that machines deserve.
Theodore Friedmann
Director, UC San Diego Program in Human Gene Therapy
Nontherapeutic gene therapy will happen one way or another. The pressure to use illicit measures for the purposes of athletic enhancement will always be there - the money involved in sports is just so enormous. But people who imagine that this sort of doping would be undetectable are wrong. Technology is not standing still. There are many testing methods being developed to detect gene-based doping.
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