The Future: Think performance enhancers are a problem now?

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...