INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

to cheat to qualify for, or excel at, the Olympic Games do so with
almost complete disregard of the health risks associated with using
untested and unregulated products and procedures in their quest for
Olympic success. Therefore, if gene doping were possible, the desire
to win an Olympic gold medal might be sufficient motivation for
some athletes to undergo such a procedure to gain an advantage over
the rest of their competition.
Athletes who disregard the notions of sport ethics, fair play, and
the ancient Greek ideals of areté and kalokagathia constitute a subset
of athletes who might seek the use of gene transfer therapies to
enhance their athletic performances. These athletes might find the
temptation to use procedures that can increase their athletic ability too
tempting to resist. Gene transfer procedures have the potential to
improve or enhance an athlete’s physical capacities in several ways.
Through an analysis of the information presented by gene transfer
experts Carl Sundberg, Geoffrey Goldspink, Barry Byrne, Douglas
Wallace, Joe Glorioso, H. Lee Sweeney, and Christopher Evans at the
Genetic Enhancement of Athletic Performance workshop, I will
determine how gene therapies can enhance athletic performance and
describe the potential benefits gene doping can produce. I will then
raise some of the important philosophical and ethical issues that arise
if athletes undergo gene transfer technologies to enhance athletic
performance. As I will argue that some of these procedures may well
be ready for use in the near future, and that the demand for them by
certain top strength and endurance athletes already exists, it is
necessary to perform a critical analysis on the issue before it becomes
a mainstream method of making athletes faster and stronger.
Training, on its own, naturally causes muscle adaptations and
changes in gene expression, which is why Olympic athletes spend so
many hours practising specific movements and skills. Dr Carl
Sundberg, whose affiliation is with the Karolinska Institutet in
Stockholm, researches the physiological effects of exercise and
training and how one might mimic the changes they produce using
gene therapies. His research shows that endurance and strength
training causes muscle tissue to adapt and alters the expression of
many genes. With this information, scientists can attempt to isolate the
genes and gene products that influence performance. By altering the
expression of the genes that code for exercise adaptations, gene
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