The state of ‘drugs in sports’ is about to take a monumental leap into the unknown with the introduction of gene therapies/gene doping. It’s a term people have heard for a while, but it’s going to be a reality in the very near future, perhaps even by the next Olympic games.
Gene therapy is being looked at as a treatment for a wide variety of diseases. As with many drugs/treatments intended to treat or avoid some disease, there is an overlap to possible athletic uses. Gene doping will make anabolic steroids, growth hormone, insulin, and the countless other drugs often employed by athletes to get an edge look like Pez candy. Furthermore, it will be difficult to impossible to detect. For example, to this day, there’s still no reliable test for growth hormone use, although the IOC keeps hinting there is one, I suspect only to scare the athletes off from using it….which does not work BTW… To give the reader an idea of this brave new world of gene therapy, below is a report –via The Associated Press – from a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology.
