Sports

Next generation of cheating: Gene doping

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — In his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, Lee Sweeney was working to help cure debilitating diseases when he isolated a gene that boosts muscle growth. By pumping the gene into his subjects, he created mighty mice 50 percent stronger than normal.

Schwarzenegger mice, the mainstream media called them.

Sweeney published a paper discussing the gene that manufactures a protein called IGF-1 — hardly topics of interest to world-class athletes, it would seem.

Then, Sweeney's phone rang. And rang. And rang.

"I got lots of calls from athletes and coaches basically ready to go," said Sweeney, chairman of Penn's physiology department. "They said, 'I want to be injected. It sounds great.' They all picked up on the fact the approach was undetectable from a testing standpoint."

This is the intersection where science fiction meets sports fact. Gene doping is the next generation of cheating, and if baseball union chief Donald Fehr's warning before Congress is correct, it will make today's era of steroids and human growth hormone "look quaint."

Sweeney explained to callers that a human body doesn't work like a mouse's and serious health risks were involved — a distinction that remains true four years later.

"To that point I was naive about the way athletes feel about these things," Sweeney said. "I assumed they would say, 'Oh, I did not understand; I thought it was ready to go' and hang up. To the contrary. They said, 'Fine, use me as a guinea pig.'''

There is a medical legitimate need for the type of work Sweeney and other researchers are conducting. Gene transfer, it is hoped, will someday benefit those with muscular dystrophy, Parkinson's, HIV, blindness, cancer and more.

The process sounds simple — load a "good" gene into a virus, then inject it like a Trojan horse and watch it conquer the "bad" gene. But scientists say getting the gene to do exactly what you want, then stop, is difficult.

Sometimes, genes trigger additional changes in the body, causing cancer. A group of about a dozen boys suffering from "Bubble Boy" syndrome responded positively to the process at first before some developed leukemia and died.

Such setbacks are why many scientists doubt that gene doping is advanced enough to successfully enhance performances at the Beijing Olympics. It's too early to say the same can be predicted for the Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010 or Summer Games in London in 2012.

Most important for the Beijing Games: It does not mean nobody will try to become a walking lab experiment in doping's newest frontier.

Anyone doubting that may have been swayed two weeks ago when an investigative report on German TV showed a Chinese doctor offering gene doping to a reporter posing as an American swimming coach for $24,000. "The fact it was a Chinese clinic I'm sure raised a lot of eyebrows," Sweeney said.

Sweeney figures it's "likely" a number of 2008 Olympians will have tried gene doping, "especially when people are willing to say, 'For $20,000 I'll inject you and it'll improve performance.'''

"It does seem like science fiction," said Jim Scherr, CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee. "But as we know, things that 50 years ago were considered impossible are now every day."

In the continuing struggle between drug cheats and drug testers, the ante could someday soar like the price of gas. That's where the University of Florida comes in. Richard Snyder, a UF associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, has teamed with Philippe Moullier, an MD and Ph.D at INSERM, France's version of the National Institutes of Health.

Their task: create a gene-doping test through a two-year grant from the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees the Olympics. Their test won't be ready for Beijing, but Moullier and Snyder said blood samples collected in China can be stored indefinitely. WADA, which banned gene doping in 2004, has warned cheaters that once the test is ready, retroactive punishment will be administered.

How much of a deterrent that is, Moullier cannot say. His eyes were opened by several former Tour de France cyclists visiting his lab in 2003. They knew gene-doping technology was unstable, yet "if they had the slightest chance to have their performances enhanced, they would do the injections," Moullier said. Most disconcerting: These cyclists were visiting Moullier to help clean up the sport.

At least with steroids or HGH, those in the underground can claim some knowledge of how to dispense the drugs. With gene doping, "We don't even know exactly how much to use," Moullier said.

It's a good news/bad news situation. The unknowns are good news for those still wrestling with traditional forms of cheating in sports, but they are bad news for patients whose lives could be saved by legitimate uses of gene transfer. (Gene transfer is the generic term for the process. When it's applied legitimately, scientists call it gene therapy. Athletic applications constitute gene doping.)

"It sounds easy, but it's extremely difficult to do it effectively," Theodore Friedmann, a professor at the University of California-San Diego, said of gene transfer.

Friedmann, who helped organize the first major conference on gene doping in 2002, added, "The field has stubbed itself in the foot a number of times by exaggerating the speed with which it's going to come to an effective treatment in the clinic."

That's the part underground peddlers might leave out.

"When I express skepticism about its impact on sport, it's because I think most of what will be offered is completely useless," said Dr. Tom Murray, president of The Hastings Center in New York and a former committee member for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

"If it has an effect, it's much more likely to diminish performance than improve performance in the near term."

Science embarked on this road in 1990, when the Human Genome Project was launched to identify the 20,000 to 25,000 genes in human DNA and determine what, if anything, could be done if a defective gene were isolated. By March 2002, it had become enough of a concern for sports officials that Friedmann organized a workshop for WADA at New York's Banbury Center, which included scientists sharing stories of fielding inquiries from coaches and athletes eager to test the technology.

The question is, how long before science perfects the process?

"You do a modification of a germ cell and then you have to wait five or 10 years or longer to see what you've done," Friedmann said. "By that time, you're either dead or your grant money has run out."

Assuming that athletes someday will be able to trade in any unsatisfactory genes, will they stop there, or will this science-fiction tale trigger a chilling sequel? Think about overzealous parents on sidelines, then ask yourself: What's to say no one will attempt to alter an embryo to produce Superbaby?

"You could even write up a screenplay or something," Friedmann said.

Scientists say altering an embryo would be difficult.

"It would be completely unethical to do that because the risks are so grave," Murray said. "If you had a child and the child grew out of that embryo and were adversely affected in any way, it would be a horrible thing to have done. ... But suppose somebody does it anyway and the child grows up having been successfully enhanced for some sport — that's a frontier we've just begun to think about."

An Australian firm called Genetic Technologies is offering an "ACTN3 Sports Gene Test" for about $80 that it says will help determine whether an athlete is naturally gifted toward sprint and power events or endurance events. The test involves a mouth swab to collect DNA. The company says it analyzes a certain protein level to determine predisposition.

Murray said it's "almost certainly a waste of money."

"And absolutely, don't do this with your child and then try to steer them into a sport because you think that they're genetically predestined to excel in that sport," Murray said. "It doesn't work that way. The company that does the testing says it won't test for children, but it has no way of knowing."

Genetic Technologies did not respond to an inquiry. In March, its test was presented as cutting-edge in a science issue of Time.

If genetic engineering someday is deemed safe and effective, more questions arise:

Is there any difference between a pitcher using it to correct his delivery and a hitter using laser-eye surgery to enhance his batting? Or athletes such as former Dolphins linebacker Zach Thomas having a hyperbaric chamber in his home to enhance oxygen in his blood?

"That's a very good question, to which there's not a simple sound-bite answer," Murray said.

In athletic circles, the debate is heating up.

"Gene doping sounds good," one Floridian wrote on a message board on MSNBC.com. "It may trickle down to us fat, slow, short people that had fat, slow, short parents. Why should genetically lucky people have all the fun?"

Murray said that's up to each sport to decide.

"We understand if we let some people do this who may do it voluntarily, the pressure will be on everybody else to do it and everybody could be much worse off, like an arms race," Murray said. "That can be a never-ending cascade and you end up with everybody taking much graver risks."

Hal Habib writes for The Palm Beach Post.