What's the Sporting Use of Science?

One of the most highly motivated scientists I have observed over the years has devoted much of his career to testing athletes for illicit drugs. He is an energetic man, a resourceful technician and a person clearly inspired by the goal of achieving total fairness in the gladiatorial arena. He argues forcefully for the proposition that international sporting competitions (indeed, any sporting competition) should be free of artificial chemical crutches. His ideal is the Olympic ideal—the notion of one individual’s pitting raw ability and willpower against another’s, unaided by amphetamines or steroids, concentrated blood cells or coiled springs in the boots. It’s a noble intent. So I’m not at all surprised that countless pharmacologists, physiologists, geneticists and biochemists are now being drawn into a burgeoning crusade to eradicate certain substances from the locker room. But the spectacle also troubles me. What, I wonder, will be the situation 10 years from now? Can we reasonably hope that sports officials and their scientific helpers will really have reinstated the principle and practice of utter, wholesome purity and equity in sport? If not—and even to pose the question is to stir up considerable doubt about the answer—we would be wise to pause and consider what the whole campaign actually is about and what it can ever expect to achieve. Take those clandestine chemicals. We know, from the definitional disputes that erupt again and again around major events, that it is difficult to compile a consistent list of “unnatural” substances. Should ethyl alcohol—a venerably natural product—be prohibited? What of other alcohols? Are glucose tablets OK? Is sodium chloride kosher? Should beta-blockers be permitted for a marksman with cardiac arrhythmia, but denied to a rival who wants them to steady the arm? Why is the pain-relieving xylocaine spray welcome in some sports but banished from others? What of the runner who takes vasodilators for hay fever? And now that sophisticated nutritional science is used to match diet, individual and event, where are we to draw distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable macro- and micronutrients? Do recent discoveries linking mood with the composition of meals convert sensible eating into an illicit therapy? And that’s only the beginning Turning to unquestionably synthetic drugs that are used to boost speed, muscle power or endurance, it’s already clear that the exterminators face an unwinnable war as they try to combat ever more ingenious techniques for avoiding detection. The spectacle of one community of researchers devising increasingly sensitive gas chromatographs to pick up traces of forbidden metabolite in urine while another community invents successively better stratagems for slipping under the monitoring net is one that should give us pause. The testers are endearingly well-intentioned. So are their opponents, although they often are portrayed as the embodiment of evil. But can either side ever hope to win the day? Then we need to take stock of recent developments in molecular biology. A decade or more ago, the Olympic authorities were on reasonably fair ground in peering at the chromosomes of lady shot-putters to disqualify those who turned out to be genetically male. True, there were arguments, because (as George. Orwell said) international sporting competition is an unfailing source of international ill will. Nevertheless, cytology seemed sufficiently certain in its revelations, and disputed cases were so infrequent, that the vast majority of athletes were happy to put their trust in the verdicts of science. Today we have gene mapping and DNA probes. So, to select just one example, it soon will be feasible to locate, measure and categorize those stretches of the human genome that determine a sprinter’s capacity to ferry oxygen to the tissues on the hemoglobin of red blood cells. There assuredly will be differences in this fragment of physiology between one individual and another, and between populations from different parts of the world. What are the implications here? Should such contrasts and the resulting inherent unfairness be ignored? Or do we need separate cardiovascular classes for the 100-yard dash, just as there are graded weight divisions in boxing? I have raised many more questions than I have answered. But there are enough problems here to suggest that the Olympic ideal—despite its powerful appeal to many athletes and sports officials—is today no more than a mirage. In short, while coaches and all involved in sports have a duty to see that people do not harm themselves by drug-taking, the ambition of preventing “unfair” biochemical advantage is becoming steadily more unrealistic and unachievable. Certainly the scientific community, and the wider community, should be taking stock of the uses to which science is now being put in the quest for this noble goal. A microbiologist by training, Dixon is European editor of THE SCIENTIST.

What's the Sporting Use of Science?

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