The Future: Think performance enhancers are a problem now?
By David Epstein,
Sports Illustrated
| 03. 11. 2008
Welcome to the era of the genetically engineered superathlete
I am one of the most avid sports fans you'll find," Se-Jin Lee says. It's true. He'll watch anything. Basketball. Football. Fútbol.
Billiards on channel seven-hundred-whatever. As a graduate student in
the '80s Lee used to sit in his car in the driveway with the radio on
to listen to the games of faraway baseball teams. Even now, in his lab
at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, he easily rattles off the
NCAA basketball tournament winners in order from 1964 to 2007. And,
like anyone who values fair competition these days, he's disturbed by
the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in sports.
Why, then, is
Lee working to usher in technology that will make even today's most
inventive doping methods look primitive? A professor of molecular
biology and genetics, the 49-year-old Lee studies genes that tell
muscles what to do -- genes that he knows how to change. As clever as
chemists are in altering steroid molecules to avoid detection (recall
BALCO's THG, a.k.a. "the Clear"), those designer drugs can be spotted
once antidoping agencies know what to look for...
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