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The drugs do work
Justin Gatlin was the world's fastest man - then, like so many sprinters before him, he failed a dope test and was banned. But the cheats who follow in his wake will be using substances that may be impossible to detect. Observer science editor Robin McKie talks to leading geneticists about the rise of the bionic athlete - and why, in this chilling new world, sport is not the only thing that will be changed beyond recognition
The Guardian
Robin McKie
Sunday February 4, 2007
Observer Sport Monthly
Lee Sweeney was relaxing in his office in the physiology department of the University of Pennsylvania when his phone rang. The call was from an athlete who had been reading about the geneticist's remarkable experiments in creating muscle-bound rodents - Schwarzenegger mice, as the press called them.
Sweeney's experiments were simple but dramatic. He had isolated a gene responsible for manufacturing a protein called IGF-1. In mammals, IGF-1 boosts muscle growth and helps their repair. When we exercise vigorously, our bodies naturally churn out the stuff. But as we age, production drops off and our muscles weaken. Sweeney wanted to find a remedy so he could help the elderly and people with muscle-wasting diseases.
So he spliced his gene into a virus and infected mice with it. The engineered virus carried the gene into each mouse's cells, where it was incorporated into the animal's DNA. Then it began pumping out excess IGF-1 directly into its muscles. The results were spectacular. Sweeney's rodents developed mighty biceps and thighs 50 per cent stronger than normal mice. He had created a super-mouse with genetically modified, pumped-up muscles.
And that is what attracted Sweeney's caller. The sprinter simply wanted to know if Sweeney could do the same for him. No, said Sweeney. The techniques used to create his Schwarzenegger mice would not yet work on humans. Our complex immune systems would block his genetically engineered viruses and prevent them from getting into our cells with their IGF-1 cargo. Many more tests and trials would be needed.
'I thought I had explained it very carefully and made it clear how far away we were from carrying out gene therapy like this on people,' Sweeney told me. 'But the guy wasn't having any of it. After I had finished he said that was fine, but could I please use him as his first human guinea pig and start experimenting on him as soon as possible, please?' At that point, Sweeney hung up.
Later that day there was a similar call from another athlete and the next day brought several more. By the end of the week, Sweeney had received dozens. 'I was besieged,' he says. Then coaches began ringing and what they wanted disturbed Sweeney even more. 'I took a call from one coach of an American college football team. He wanted me to inject every one of his players with the IGF-1 gene. To be fair, he did back down when I pointed out the techniques had not been tested on humans. Not every coach was that enlightened, however. Some would have quite happily tried out untested genetic enhancement techniques on all their players on the off-chance that might give them an edge over opponents.'
In the end, Sweeney stopped taking calls from sportsmen. He had started his animal experiments on the IGF-1 gene in the late 1990s to help the elderly and sick. 'Helping athletes was the last thing on my mind. But every time a new genetic study about boosting muscle quality or blood supply or bone strength is published, the calls start up again. These people cruise the internet for anything they think could give them a chance to become stronger, faster athletes.'
For Sweeney and many other geneticists, the issue is now an urgent and disturbing one. The rising tide of phone calls and the internet searches reveal the presence of a widespread underground industry that is targeting our runners, football players and rowers. The ultimate aim is to turn them into Formula One athletes, bionic sportsmen whose performances have more to do with science and investment than endeavour and natural ability. The crucial point is that gene therapy - or gene-doping - promises to bring that science fiction dream much closer.
In the past, athletes took drugs such as anabolic steroids to make them stronger or quicker. But these substances leave testable traces. So other drugs - such as diuretics - are used as masking agents. But these, in turn, leave traces. In 2003, Shane Warne tested positive for a couple of diuretics and served a 12-month ban, for example. But with gene therapy, genes are inserted into muscle or bone cells and their proteins fed directly into that tissue. 'I had deliberately designed my experiments so that no IGF-1 would leak into arteries because I didn't want the stuff circulating round a patient's bloodstream,' says Sweeney. 'It might affect the muscles of their hearts, I realised. However, at no point did I talk about this feature in public. Nevertheless, it was picked up by athletes and coaches. These people know their physiology. They realised this kind of gene therapy would be incredibly hard to detect.'
It is a point backed by Peter Schjerling, a researcher from the Muscle Research Centre in Copenhagen. 'Artificial genes will produce proteins that are identical to those in the human body so that detection, in practice, will be impossible.' Simon Eassom, head of Sports Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, agrees: 'To all intents and purposes, signs of gene-doping are entirely undetectable.'
The problem - which has been simmering for almost two decades - is now reaching a crisis. In 1999, responsibility for drug-testing was devolved from the International Olympic Committee to the newly created World Anti-Doping Agency. At the same time, those supplying the drugs have demonstrated extraordinary cunning.
Consider the story of Balco - the Bay Area Laboratory Co‑operative - which was eventually exposed as supplier of the designer steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). No one at Wada had developed a test for it because no one knew of its existence. Yet its use was widespread. Among those subsequently linked with Balco, based in San Francisco, were baseball professionals Barry Bonds and Benito Santiago, British sprinter Dwain Chambers, hammer thrower John McEwen and shot putters CJ Hunter and Kevin Toth. A test now exists for THG, but few experts doubt other designer steroids are being made, or have already been designed to bypass existing tests. It is, in effect, a Darwinian battle with each side evolving strategies to bypass the other. The question is: who will win in the end, now the gene-dopers have joined the struggle?
I visited Liberal Democrat MP Phil Willis at the House of Commons. He is chairman of the Commons Select Science and Technology Committee, which is investigating performance enhancement in sport. For the past three months, he and fellow committee members have sat in dusty rooms listening to the evidence of sport and drug experts. 'It became very clear, very early on in our inquiry, that enhancement and drug-taking by athletes were significantly greater than we had expected and that they were significantly greater than sports authorities realised,' Willis told me. Official statistics indicate that between one and two per cent of tested athletes are found to be positive for drugs. The real figure is many times that, Willis says. The problem is that so many athletes are taking testosterone and steroids that the problem cannot be tackled in time for next year's Olympics in Beijing. Thus we can expect even more headlines about disgraced runners, weightlifters and long-jumpers being sent home from China. Sadly, we have got used to these stories. So should we care? Isn't the idea of sporting purity a lost cause? Willis is certain that this is not the case and is adamant that everything must be done to ensure the 2012 London Olympics are the cleanest Games for decades. 'This is the one chance we have to draw a line and say enough is enough.'
His committee - whose report on performance enhancement in sport is to be published in a few days - is considering a range of corrective measures to ensure this. These include the introduction of a 'bio-card', which would contain details of an athlete's blood type, heartbeat patterns, DNA and other biological records. Competitors could then be tested for a complex array of biological variables that would quickly reveal if any enhancement had occurred since their cards had been created.
Making drug-taking in sport a criminal offence in Britain is also being considered, though it would be hard to implement. In addition, athletes who are found to have taken drugs would not be allowed to return to competitive sport until they had co-operated fully in the tracing of all other offenders caught up in their case. Another idea that has intrigued MPs would be to insist that athletes be tested for a range of substances a year before they actually compete at major events. Far too often, athletes disappear from view before reappearing with bulging biceps that have probably been chemically enhanced but whose steroid origins are no longer detectable.
The ultimate aim of such measures is to return sport to the ancient concept of the pure pursuit of excellence, says Willis. 'We want to make the playing field as level as possible.' But as the MP acknowledges, playing fields are never really level. (Willis is a long-time Leeds United season-ticket holder, so he should know.)
Circumstances change and ethical certainties shift, producing baffling contradictions. Why, for example, is it acceptable to permit laser surgery to improve an archer's eyesight while the boosting of an athlete's body mass by chemical means is forbidden? Or consider the issue of oxygen supply. In the 1964 Winter Olympics, the Finnish cross-country skier Eero Mantyranta won two golds, a feat that was traced to his possession of a rare mutation in his DNA that caused him to churn out unusually high levels of red blood cells (which carry oxygen to our muscles and give them power). Mantyranta's natural genetic advantage made him unbeatable. However, there are ways to generate this kind of prowess artificially. Live up a high mountain for a few months and your red-blood supply will be boosted by the low oxygen levels there. Or you can train in a hypoxic chamber that recreates the thin atmosphere of a mountain top. Or you can give yourself a shot of EPO, which will boost the number of red blood cells in your arteries. Or one day you will be able - thanks to gene therapy - to give yourself an extra dose of DNA that will automatically boost your own production of red blood cells. The last two practices on this list are banned by sports bodies, but the first two are accepted, though in the case of hypoxic chambers the go-ahead was agreed only after a long, pained reappraisal of their use by Wada last year. It was a close run thing, however. Thus we can see that the line that separates legal and illegal enhancements is a shifting, uncertain one.
Andreea Raducan was only 16 when she won the combined exercises at the 2000 Olympic Games. The Romanian gymnast was a short, elfin figure with an innocent, childlike demeanour. Hence the shock when she was stripped of her title for taking pseudo-ephedrine. The drug was part of a cold cure given to her by her team doctor. Tough luck, you might think, but rules are rules. The trouble is that the rules are constantly being changed. In 2003, Wada removed pseudo-ephedrine from its banned list. 'Let's be reasonable,' said **** Pound, the agency's chairman, at the time. For Raducan, the decision was anything but reasonable. She lost a medal for taking a substance now used happily by athletes. 'All I did was take a cold pill, which didn't help me at all during my competition,' she complained at the time. 'It was a nightmare,' added her coach, Octavian Belu. 'We will not forgive or forget.' In Romania, Raducan was seen as anything but a disgraced figure. She was given a replacement medal in pure gold by a jeweller and for a while it was even rumoured that a Raducan doll would be marketed.
A similar feeling of outrage no doubt affected Inger Miller, the US sprinter who was stripped of her bronze in the 1999 World Indoor Athletics Championships for taking caffeine, a drug that was rehabilitated at the same time as pseudo-ephedrine. Her case contrasts with that of Linford Christie who, in the same year, was found to have traces of nandrolone, an anabolic steroid, in his urine. A UK Athletics panel cleared him because it 'could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt that the substance present in the sample was derived from a prohibited substance'.
The situation is complex, rules are constantly changed and interpretation of them remains uncertain. As a result, many experts believe it is time to take a new simplified approach to drug-taking or face the prospect of being submerged by tidal waves of misuse. One of these is the Oxford ethicist and expert on drug use in sport, Professor Julian Savulescu. He believes drugs such as HGH, beta-blockers and even EPO should now be allowed in sport. 'Instead, we should concentrate our efforts on exposing users of harmful drugs. Anabolic steroids can often cause heart and other problems. Similarly genetic interventions - gene-doping - are also likely to be dangerous, for the science involved is still in its infancy. That is what we should be really concerned about.'
The real problem, says Savulescu, is that people have forgotten that athletes have always sought to enhance their performances, not just by exercising but by trying new diets and supplements and by attempting to alter their bodies chemically. Ancient Greek Olympians ate sheep testicles - which we now recognise as a source of testosterone - to improve their athleticism. In the late 19th century, cyclists began using caffeine, cocaine and ether-coated sugar cubes to improve performance and reduce pain, while at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, America's Thomas Hicks won the marathon fuelled with drinks of brandy laced with strychnine (a stimulant in low doses). He collapsed on crossing the tape and was not revived for several alarming hours.
Putting blanket bans on enhancements - now that science is generating more and more of them - is doomed to failure, according to Savulescu, especially when the potential rewards are simply irresistible. 'Saying we should ban drugs in sport because they improve performance is like saying we should ban alcohol at parties because it makes people more sociable,' he claims. It is a point backed by Michele Verroken, former director of ethics and anti-doping for UK Sport, who now runs her own consultancy, Sporting Integrity. 'Sporting authorities do not want a debate on ethics because it would throw everything up in the air,' she says.
But what happens in sport today will affect society tomorrow. A host of new medicines are being developed to help those with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, muscle-wasting diseases and other conditions. Many of these will undoubtedly help patients. But they are also likely to boost performance in the healthy: Alzheimer's drugs could help us to concentrate better, for example. Would a student taking these during exams be cheating? Will we have to introduce pre-exam drug tests? 'Society will have to make up its mind,' says Savulescu. 'The trouble is, we are being directed down this road by sporting authorities who are setting examples but who really don't have the gravitas for making such decisions.'
Consider human growth hormone (HGH), which stimulates muscle and bone growth: if you fail to make it at puberty, your growth will be stunted. In the late 1980s, scientists isolated the HGH gene and began to grow large amounts in biotechnology plants: great news for doctors and patients - and the black market. HGH became the drug du jour for many weightlifters and athletes, and its use spread with startling speed, despite being banned by all sports authorities.
In 1998, an Australian customs official stopped a member of the Chinese swimming team arriving for the world championships at Perth and found his suitcase was stuffed with phials of HGH. Similarly, at the Sydney Olympics, in 2000, Sergei Voynov, the Uzbek athletics coach, was caught trying to bring in 15 vials in a jar that was conveniently labelled 'HGH' in large letters just in case he might forget what he was carrying.
According to physiologist Dr Keith Stokes at Bath University, levels of HGH abuse by athletes have now reached striking levels. 'But it's not at all clear that HGH will do them much good,' adds Stokes. 'Most studies suggest HGH has little effect after puberty. Yet lots of athletes are now taking it.' At American colleges, HGH has spread from top athletes down to other students who merely like to work out in gyms or who want to keep fit. In this way, sport and its influence on doping and drug-taking are already having a growing impact on everyday life.
There is, too, the issue of the use of genetics not as a source of enhancements, but as a way of identifying promising athletes. Tests are being developed that will allow geneticists and doctors to select those young people who are going to develop sporting physiques. They can then be selected for intensive training. This, according to Andy Miah, reader in bioethics at Paisley University, raises challenging ethical questions about how DNA databases will function in society. 'You can see easily how genetic tests will be able to build up information about athletes' capacities,' Miah says. 'Indeed, we already have the first of such gene tests in use. This is a mouth-swab test that reveals information about what proportion of muscle-fibre type a person has: a lot of slow-twitch muscle-fibre type, which would make you good at endurance competitions, or a large proportion of fast-twitch muscle-fibre type, which makes you better at explosive or power events. You can see how tests like these will first be used at high levels of sport, then spread into colleges and schools to pinpoint promising pupils. Next thing you know, you will have our population being tested at birth.'
It is just this vision that alarms so many ethicists and scientists. They fear we face a future in which those born with the right DNA, or those that can afford to enhance it, will be preferred. Thus we risk creating a privileged elite and at the same time an underclass of genetic losers. The shocking thing is that this may come about, not because of political interference, but because of the drive by thousands of sportsmen and women to gain the slightest of advantages over their competitors. 'I read Brave New World recently,' says Michele Verroken. 'I had to throw it away. It was too frightening, for that is just the culture we are now creating.'
We have a little way to go before we reach such a future - but not that far. The revolution has already come a long way in a short time, particularly in terms of gene-doping. Most experts believe it is only a matter of time before the first genetically enhanced athlete is let loose at a major event. 'I am sure there is some rogue laboratory, somewhere in the world, that is already trying to alter the genes of an athlete scheduled to compete at the next Olympics ,' says Lee Sweeney. 'One idea would be to turn off a person's immune system so it can no longer fight off the viruses that bring in the new genes. Needless to say, that is a very risky thing to attempt. But risk doesn't seem to worry sports stars. They just want an edge - at all costs.'
Justin Gatlin was the world's fastest man - then, like so many sprinters before him, he failed a dope test and was banned. But the cheats who follow in his wake will be using substances that may be impossible to detect. Observer science editor Robin McKie talks to leading geneticists about the rise of the bionic athlete - and why, in this chilling new world, sport is not the only thing that will be changed beyond recognition
The Guardian
Robin McKie
Sunday February 4, 2007
Observer Sport Monthly
Lee Sweeney was relaxing in his office in the physiology department of the University of Pennsylvania when his phone rang. The call was from an athlete who had been reading about the geneticist's remarkable experiments in creating muscle-bound rodents - Schwarzenegger mice, as the press called them.
Sweeney's experiments were simple but dramatic. He had isolated a gene responsible for manufacturing a protein called IGF-1. In mammals, IGF-1 boosts muscle growth and helps their repair. When we exercise vigorously, our bodies naturally churn out the stuff. But as we age, production drops off and our muscles weaken. Sweeney wanted to find a remedy so he could help the elderly and people with muscle-wasting diseases.
So he spliced his gene into a virus and infected mice with it. The engineered virus carried the gene into each mouse's cells, where it was incorporated into the animal's DNA. Then it began pumping out excess IGF-1 directly into its muscles. The results were spectacular. Sweeney's rodents developed mighty biceps and thighs 50 per cent stronger than normal mice. He had created a super-mouse with genetically modified, pumped-up muscles.
And that is what attracted Sweeney's caller. The sprinter simply wanted to know if Sweeney could do the same for him. No, said Sweeney. The techniques used to create his Schwarzenegger mice would not yet work on humans. Our complex immune systems would block his genetically engineered viruses and prevent them from getting into our cells with their IGF-1 cargo. Many more tests and trials would be needed.
'I thought I had explained it very carefully and made it clear how far away we were from carrying out gene therapy like this on people,' Sweeney told me. 'But the guy wasn't having any of it. After I had finished he said that was fine, but could I please use him as his first human guinea pig and start experimenting on him as soon as possible, please?' At that point, Sweeney hung up.
Later that day there was a similar call from another athlete and the next day brought several more. By the end of the week, Sweeney had received dozens. 'I was besieged,' he says. Then coaches began ringing and what they wanted disturbed Sweeney even more. 'I took a call from one coach of an American college football team. He wanted me to inject every one of his players with the IGF-1 gene. To be fair, he did back down when I pointed out the techniques had not been tested on humans. Not every coach was that enlightened, however. Some would have quite happily tried out untested genetic enhancement techniques on all their players on the off-chance that might give them an edge over opponents.'
In the end, Sweeney stopped taking calls from sportsmen. He had started his animal experiments on the IGF-1 gene in the late 1990s to help the elderly and sick. 'Helping athletes was the last thing on my mind. But every time a new genetic study about boosting muscle quality or blood supply or bone strength is published, the calls start up again. These people cruise the internet for anything they think could give them a chance to become stronger, faster athletes.'
For Sweeney and many other geneticists, the issue is now an urgent and disturbing one. The rising tide of phone calls and the internet searches reveal the presence of a widespread underground industry that is targeting our runners, football players and rowers. The ultimate aim is to turn them into Formula One athletes, bionic sportsmen whose performances have more to do with science and investment than endeavour and natural ability. The crucial point is that gene therapy - or gene-doping - promises to bring that science fiction dream much closer.
In the past, athletes took drugs such as anabolic steroids to make them stronger or quicker. But these substances leave testable traces. So other drugs - such as diuretics - are used as masking agents. But these, in turn, leave traces. In 2003, Shane Warne tested positive for a couple of diuretics and served a 12-month ban, for example. But with gene therapy, genes are inserted into muscle or bone cells and their proteins fed directly into that tissue. 'I had deliberately designed my experiments so that no IGF-1 would leak into arteries because I didn't want the stuff circulating round a patient's bloodstream,' says Sweeney. 'It might affect the muscles of their hearts, I realised. However, at no point did I talk about this feature in public. Nevertheless, it was picked up by athletes and coaches. These people know their physiology. They realised this kind of gene therapy would be incredibly hard to detect.'
It is a point backed by Peter Schjerling, a researcher from the Muscle Research Centre in Copenhagen. 'Artificial genes will produce proteins that are identical to those in the human body so that detection, in practice, will be impossible.' Simon Eassom, head of Sports Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester, agrees: 'To all intents and purposes, signs of gene-doping are entirely undetectable.'
The problem - which has been simmering for almost two decades - is now reaching a crisis. In 1999, responsibility for drug-testing was devolved from the International Olympic Committee to the newly created World Anti-Doping Agency. At the same time, those supplying the drugs have demonstrated extraordinary cunning.
Consider the story of Balco - the Bay Area Laboratory Co‑operative - which was eventually exposed as supplier of the designer steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). No one at Wada had developed a test for it because no one knew of its existence. Yet its use was widespread. Among those subsequently linked with Balco, based in San Francisco, were baseball professionals Barry Bonds and Benito Santiago, British sprinter Dwain Chambers, hammer thrower John McEwen and shot putters CJ Hunter and Kevin Toth. A test now exists for THG, but few experts doubt other designer steroids are being made, or have already been designed to bypass existing tests. It is, in effect, a Darwinian battle with each side evolving strategies to bypass the other. The question is: who will win in the end, now the gene-dopers have joined the struggle?
I visited Liberal Democrat MP Phil Willis at the House of Commons. He is chairman of the Commons Select Science and Technology Committee, which is investigating performance enhancement in sport. For the past three months, he and fellow committee members have sat in dusty rooms listening to the evidence of sport and drug experts. 'It became very clear, very early on in our inquiry, that enhancement and drug-taking by athletes were significantly greater than we had expected and that they were significantly greater than sports authorities realised,' Willis told me. Official statistics indicate that between one and two per cent of tested athletes are found to be positive for drugs. The real figure is many times that, Willis says. The problem is that so many athletes are taking testosterone and steroids that the problem cannot be tackled in time for next year's Olympics in Beijing. Thus we can expect even more headlines about disgraced runners, weightlifters and long-jumpers being sent home from China. Sadly, we have got used to these stories. So should we care? Isn't the idea of sporting purity a lost cause? Willis is certain that this is not the case and is adamant that everything must be done to ensure the 2012 London Olympics are the cleanest Games for decades. 'This is the one chance we have to draw a line and say enough is enough.'
His committee - whose report on performance enhancement in sport is to be published in a few days - is considering a range of corrective measures to ensure this. These include the introduction of a 'bio-card', which would contain details of an athlete's blood type, heartbeat patterns, DNA and other biological records. Competitors could then be tested for a complex array of biological variables that would quickly reveal if any enhancement had occurred since their cards had been created.
Making drug-taking in sport a criminal offence in Britain is also being considered, though it would be hard to implement. In addition, athletes who are found to have taken drugs would not be allowed to return to competitive sport until they had co-operated fully in the tracing of all other offenders caught up in their case. Another idea that has intrigued MPs would be to insist that athletes be tested for a range of substances a year before they actually compete at major events. Far too often, athletes disappear from view before reappearing with bulging biceps that have probably been chemically enhanced but whose steroid origins are no longer detectable.
The ultimate aim of such measures is to return sport to the ancient concept of the pure pursuit of excellence, says Willis. 'We want to make the playing field as level as possible.' But as the MP acknowledges, playing fields are never really level. (Willis is a long-time Leeds United season-ticket holder, so he should know.)
Circumstances change and ethical certainties shift, producing baffling contradictions. Why, for example, is it acceptable to permit laser surgery to improve an archer's eyesight while the boosting of an athlete's body mass by chemical means is forbidden? Or consider the issue of oxygen supply. In the 1964 Winter Olympics, the Finnish cross-country skier Eero Mantyranta won two golds, a feat that was traced to his possession of a rare mutation in his DNA that caused him to churn out unusually high levels of red blood cells (which carry oxygen to our muscles and give them power). Mantyranta's natural genetic advantage made him unbeatable. However, there are ways to generate this kind of prowess artificially. Live up a high mountain for a few months and your red-blood supply will be boosted by the low oxygen levels there. Or you can train in a hypoxic chamber that recreates the thin atmosphere of a mountain top. Or you can give yourself a shot of EPO, which will boost the number of red blood cells in your arteries. Or one day you will be able - thanks to gene therapy - to give yourself an extra dose of DNA that will automatically boost your own production of red blood cells. The last two practices on this list are banned by sports bodies, but the first two are accepted, though in the case of hypoxic chambers the go-ahead was agreed only after a long, pained reappraisal of their use by Wada last year. It was a close run thing, however. Thus we can see that the line that separates legal and illegal enhancements is a shifting, uncertain one.
Andreea Raducan was only 16 when she won the combined exercises at the 2000 Olympic Games. The Romanian gymnast was a short, elfin figure with an innocent, childlike demeanour. Hence the shock when she was stripped of her title for taking pseudo-ephedrine. The drug was part of a cold cure given to her by her team doctor. Tough luck, you might think, but rules are rules. The trouble is that the rules are constantly being changed. In 2003, Wada removed pseudo-ephedrine from its banned list. 'Let's be reasonable,' said **** Pound, the agency's chairman, at the time. For Raducan, the decision was anything but reasonable. She lost a medal for taking a substance now used happily by athletes. 'All I did was take a cold pill, which didn't help me at all during my competition,' she complained at the time. 'It was a nightmare,' added her coach, Octavian Belu. 'We will not forgive or forget.' In Romania, Raducan was seen as anything but a disgraced figure. She was given a replacement medal in pure gold by a jeweller and for a while it was even rumoured that a Raducan doll would be marketed.
A similar feeling of outrage no doubt affected Inger Miller, the US sprinter who was stripped of her bronze in the 1999 World Indoor Athletics Championships for taking caffeine, a drug that was rehabilitated at the same time as pseudo-ephedrine. Her case contrasts with that of Linford Christie who, in the same year, was found to have traces of nandrolone, an anabolic steroid, in his urine. A UK Athletics panel cleared him because it 'could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt that the substance present in the sample was derived from a prohibited substance'.
The situation is complex, rules are constantly changed and interpretation of them remains uncertain. As a result, many experts believe it is time to take a new simplified approach to drug-taking or face the prospect of being submerged by tidal waves of misuse. One of these is the Oxford ethicist and expert on drug use in sport, Professor Julian Savulescu. He believes drugs such as HGH, beta-blockers and even EPO should now be allowed in sport. 'Instead, we should concentrate our efforts on exposing users of harmful drugs. Anabolic steroids can often cause heart and other problems. Similarly genetic interventions - gene-doping - are also likely to be dangerous, for the science involved is still in its infancy. That is what we should be really concerned about.'
The real problem, says Savulescu, is that people have forgotten that athletes have always sought to enhance their performances, not just by exercising but by trying new diets and supplements and by attempting to alter their bodies chemically. Ancient Greek Olympians ate sheep testicles - which we now recognise as a source of testosterone - to improve their athleticism. In the late 19th century, cyclists began using caffeine, cocaine and ether-coated sugar cubes to improve performance and reduce pain, while at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis, America's Thomas Hicks won the marathon fuelled with drinks of brandy laced with strychnine (a stimulant in low doses). He collapsed on crossing the tape and was not revived for several alarming hours.
Putting blanket bans on enhancements - now that science is generating more and more of them - is doomed to failure, according to Savulescu, especially when the potential rewards are simply irresistible. 'Saying we should ban drugs in sport because they improve performance is like saying we should ban alcohol at parties because it makes people more sociable,' he claims. It is a point backed by Michele Verroken, former director of ethics and anti-doping for UK Sport, who now runs her own consultancy, Sporting Integrity. 'Sporting authorities do not want a debate on ethics because it would throw everything up in the air,' she says.
But what happens in sport today will affect society tomorrow. A host of new medicines are being developed to help those with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, muscle-wasting diseases and other conditions. Many of these will undoubtedly help patients. But they are also likely to boost performance in the healthy: Alzheimer's drugs could help us to concentrate better, for example. Would a student taking these during exams be cheating? Will we have to introduce pre-exam drug tests? 'Society will have to make up its mind,' says Savulescu. 'The trouble is, we are being directed down this road by sporting authorities who are setting examples but who really don't have the gravitas for making such decisions.'
Consider human growth hormone (HGH), which stimulates muscle and bone growth: if you fail to make it at puberty, your growth will be stunted. In the late 1980s, scientists isolated the HGH gene and began to grow large amounts in biotechnology plants: great news for doctors and patients - and the black market. HGH became the drug du jour for many weightlifters and athletes, and its use spread with startling speed, despite being banned by all sports authorities.
In 1998, an Australian customs official stopped a member of the Chinese swimming team arriving for the world championships at Perth and found his suitcase was stuffed with phials of HGH. Similarly, at the Sydney Olympics, in 2000, Sergei Voynov, the Uzbek athletics coach, was caught trying to bring in 15 vials in a jar that was conveniently labelled 'HGH' in large letters just in case he might forget what he was carrying.
According to physiologist Dr Keith Stokes at Bath University, levels of HGH abuse by athletes have now reached striking levels. 'But it's not at all clear that HGH will do them much good,' adds Stokes. 'Most studies suggest HGH has little effect after puberty. Yet lots of athletes are now taking it.' At American colleges, HGH has spread from top athletes down to other students who merely like to work out in gyms or who want to keep fit. In this way, sport and its influence on doping and drug-taking are already having a growing impact on everyday life.
There is, too, the issue of the use of genetics not as a source of enhancements, but as a way of identifying promising athletes. Tests are being developed that will allow geneticists and doctors to select those young people who are going to develop sporting physiques. They can then be selected for intensive training. This, according to Andy Miah, reader in bioethics at Paisley University, raises challenging ethical questions about how DNA databases will function in society. 'You can see easily how genetic tests will be able to build up information about athletes' capacities,' Miah says. 'Indeed, we already have the first of such gene tests in use. This is a mouth-swab test that reveals information about what proportion of muscle-fibre type a person has: a lot of slow-twitch muscle-fibre type, which would make you good at endurance competitions, or a large proportion of fast-twitch muscle-fibre type, which makes you better at explosive or power events. You can see how tests like these will first be used at high levels of sport, then spread into colleges and schools to pinpoint promising pupils. Next thing you know, you will have our population being tested at birth.'
It is just this vision that alarms so many ethicists and scientists. They fear we face a future in which those born with the right DNA, or those that can afford to enhance it, will be preferred. Thus we risk creating a privileged elite and at the same time an underclass of genetic losers. The shocking thing is that this may come about, not because of political interference, but because of the drive by thousands of sportsmen and women to gain the slightest of advantages over their competitors. 'I read Brave New World recently,' says Michele Verroken. 'I had to throw it away. It was too frightening, for that is just the culture we are now creating.'
We have a little way to go before we reach such a future - but not that far. The revolution has already come a long way in a short time, particularly in terms of gene-doping. Most experts believe it is only a matter of time before the first genetically enhanced athlete is let loose at a major event. 'I am sure there is some rogue laboratory, somewhere in the world, that is already trying to alter the genes of an athlete scheduled to compete at the next Olympics ,' says Lee Sweeney. 'One idea would be to turn off a person's immune system so it can no longer fight off the viruses that bring in the new genes. Needless to say, that is a very risky thing to attempt. But risk doesn't seem to worry sports stars. They just want an edge - at all costs.'
