Doping — The Olympic Spirit?

Swimming, wrestling, cycling, rowing — did you also enjoy watching the summer Olympics in Greece? Were you, like me, fascinated by the performances of athletes in the various events? Or did the almost daily doping cases in Athens, and the seemingly increasing frequency of medal winners being disqualified by functionaries, detract from the pleasure you derived from the exciting competition at this great sporting occasion?
Nandrolone, erythropoietin (epo) and clenbuterol — therapeutic drugs that are normally used to combat illness — are exploited by athletes to increase their performance. They are but examples of a multitude of substances that are used for doping. The official list of the International Olympics Committee includes several hundred of them!

And doping will continue to accompany top-level sport in the future. Athletes and their trainers will attempt to take advantage of increasingly more refined methods to reach higher achievements. The term gene-doping arises whenever future possibilities of doping are discussed. Experts such as Prof. Wilhelm Schänzer of the Institute for Biochemistry at the German Sport College in Cologne are of the opinion that research on human hereditary material, and the unravelling of all human genes in the Human Genome Project, will result in the discovery of new ways for manipulating sporting perfomance. The gene therapy is intended to become a method for healing or stopping genetically based illness (hereditary disease), but therapeutic uses could be put to misuse as soon as they are available.
For example, the formation of more muscle mass could be induced by blocking the action of myostatin — a protein that regulates muscle growth — and siRNA's could be applied as the myostatin blocker. Robert Slany describes on the other hand a therapeutic use of such siRNA's on page 24 of this issue.
Doping with epo by perseverance sportsman will also be made easier through gene manipulation. As early as 1999, a workgroup at the University of Pennsylvania achieved an increase in the production of red blood cells in monkeys by application of an additional epo-gene. The more of these cells in the blood, the better the supply of oxygen to the body and so the better the endurance. As the body of the athlete would produce the cause of the improvement itself, analytical detection of the substances would be difficult if not impossible.
This type of doping is extremely dangerous. Gene therapies that could be of interest to athletes are still in the basic research stage. They have not yet been been put to clinical trials on humans, and the few of them that have been medically used in any way have apparently been involved in unexpected deaths of some subjects. Long live the olympic spirit!

-Marc Platthaus-