Gene doping a risky route to glory for athletes
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Gene therapy offers Olympic athletes a tempting new way to go for the gold, but the technology is far too risky a way to cheat, a top gene therapy expert said on Thursday.
Gene doping - in which DNA is introduced into the body through an inactivated virus or by other means - can alter a person’s genetic make up and improve athletic performance by building muscle and increasing blood flow.
“We know we can introduce genes now to correct disease. It’s not a great leap to say we can also change genes related to normal human performance, like those required for athletic performance,” said Dr. Ted Friedmann, director of the Center for Molecular Genetics at the University of California’s San Diego’s School of Medicine.
But the risks could be dear, he said, noting that some patients have died in gene therapy studies.
“It’s almost guaranteed to be dangerous with the current technology. It would be very foolish for any athlete to allow it to be done to him or herself,” said Friedmann, a scientific adviser to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) who wrote a commentary in the journal Science.
“In the case of participating trainers or doctors, it would constitute professional or medical malpractice, at least in my view,” Friedmann said in a telephone interview.
Friedmann and colleagues wrote the commentary just ahead of the 2010 Winter Olympics next week as a warning to athletes and the sporting world not to take gene doping lightly.
“We know the world of sport and disreputable trainers and athletes don’t necessarily wait for a technology to be ripe and safe to use it,” Friedmann said.
“We’re trying to say the methodology in gene therapy is powerful but highly experimental and requires application really in dire disease, and not in a whimsical enhancement for the purpose of sport,” he told Reuters.
Friedmann said WADA is working on ways to test for gene doping.
“The tests are obviously different from the tests for the more traditional drug-based doping,” he said, involving powerful gene characterization methods.
“One doesn’t have to know what drug was used. One can identify the effects that drug has had through the use of genetic tools,” Friedmann said.
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By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters)
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