So it'd be like motor racing -- stock and modified classes?
How would the modified classes be regulated, or would they? Would there be 100m stock, 100m GT and 100m Prototype, based on the types of enhancements and weight of the participant? Wow, imagine if the rules changed year to year. Like suppose you had folks in Prototype chopping off their noses to increase their power to weight ratios, and next year they increase the minimum weight and now you have to install ballast in your ass last minute to get your weight back up.
With the Olympics due to kick off on 27 July in London, this article takes a look at how far science would be able to push human athletic abilities if all restrictions on doping were lifted. The article mentions anabolic steroids (up to 38% increase in strength), IGF-1 (4% increase in sprinting capacity), EPO/blood doping (34% increase in stamina), gene doping and various drugs and supplements, as well as more 'extreme' measures such as surgery and prosthesis. Hugh Herr, a biomechanical engineer at MIT, says performance-enhancing technologies will one day demand an Olympics all their own. But is that time already upon us?
It's kind of disgusting to encourage people to fuck up their bodies to win an athletic competition.
A lot of the things you could do to yourself to help you run faster next year are not exactly going to improve your health. And children need role models.
>"It's kind of disgusting to encourage people to fuck up their bodies to win an athletic competition."
You know what else is disgusting? The fact that we have medicine out there that, because it's seen as "performance-enhancing" in sport, maintains a stigma of being disgusting and harmful.
The same people who tell you that taking steroids and other enhancers will instantly shrink your balls and kill your liver are the same folk who told you that smoking a joint would make you jump off the roof of your building. It's nonsense.
I can't wait for the day when humans are taking performance enhancing substances of all sorts, fully accepted by all, because they can enhance performance. Who doesn't want that?
The problem is, once an athlete begins taking performance enhancers, every other athlete in the sport has to as well, to stay competitive. Then suddenly those in the minor leagues/college are not competitive to move to the majors, so they start taking performance enhancers. But then high schoolers aren't competitive to move up, so high schoolers have to take performance enhancers.
This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if we had performance enhancing drugs that had no side effects. Unfortunately we don't. You seem sure that performance enhancers are harmless, but they most certainly are not.
The same is true of any training method which has harmful side effects or risks.
How do you distinguish morally between the (completely natural) risk of death by heatstroke during summer training and the risks of performance enhancing drugs?
The difference between training harder and taking drugs to be able to train harder is that your body is naturally only capable of so much. Eventually you will give out, and that is your limit. The point where you start feeling pain is the point where you know to stop. Taking drugs to increase this limit is where the risks lie; your body isn't capable of sustaining that level of performance. For example, caffeine might wake you up, but it puts you in a crash not long after. Your body isn't capable of sustaining that high of an adrenaline level.
Training regimes allow your body to tell you its limits, drugs bypass that to get you a new, unsustainable level where doing long term damage isn't just possible.. it's likely.
I guess there is no moral difference, but a practical one of being able to _check it_.
Autoemotransfusion (or however you say in english "inject your own blood") is not the same as taking artifical drugs, but can be checked and it's not allowed.
I can't comment on whether these drugs affect someone or not, but it is interesting to note that Feynman tried LSD once and then dropped it because he was worried about the potential effects it would have on his brain. In fact, a lot of the smartest people I know say that they don't do drugs not for any moral reason, but because they are worried they will damage their mind in some unforeseen way.
If I want to make a living as a professional athlete and I don't want the side effect of these treatments, then I certainly don't want other people to take them, because I will be outclassed and won't be able to make living without screwing up my body.
Even without doping, athletic training is not necessarily what you would call "healthy". Take an anecdotic example: A guy doing basketball professionally for years, and now requiring knee surgery because his knee is just destroyed.
I think it's the focus on extreme athletic performance that encourages people to "fuck up their bodies". I guess encouraging doping would make it worse, but then my expectation is that the athletes who actually win competitions already do doping most of the time.
I'm not saying sports should be banned. Just be aware of the costs.
I really don't understand this assumption that all performance enhancing substances will destroy your body. Not all doping is steriods. Some of it is for enhanced healing and recovery, something that should be researched. And in many cases abuse is the problem not use - as they say, the dose makes the poison. As we increase our ability to track and monitor drug response, internal vital statistics, and homeostasis; the notion of side-effects will become less nebulous. The problem is we are flying blind at the moment.
Do you know what site specific genetic therapies, drugs for cancer, HIV, malaria and performance enhancing substances have in common? In order to not do collateral damage they all require precise delivery to targets and an understanding of how a person's genome, protein networks and metabolism interact. Any understanding that comes from a better model of these interactions will have positive knock off effects on all the other areas. Just like we have the video game industry to thank in part for modern performance computing - monetarily motivated "doping" could also impact conditions like osteoporosis, obesity, Parkinsons and ALS.
Then there is an assumption that anything good must come with a cost. While it is true that nothing is free, it is not always the case that the negatives will outweigh or balance the positive. For example, in the short term it looks like anything beyond our current silicon based mouse, touch, keyboard paradigm is just pie in the sky. But if you were to go back to when computers were built from relays and vacuum tubes, their prediction of the future trajectory of computing would be drastically different from today's because transistors, ICs and VLSI did not exist yet.
Biology is very complex but not all the complexity is inherent. Some of it is due to approcah. And this is changing as quantitative approaches become more prevalent and biology continues to increase the ability of its practictioners to fix radios.
It's kind of disgusting to encourage people to fuck up their bodies to win an athletic competition.
By what standard? Who are you to say what other people should do with their bodies? I mean, I can just as easily say that it's disgusting to suggest that an individual shouldn't be able to mod his body any way he wants. Why not acknowledge self-ownership, and just accept that you can do anything you want to yourself.
"Why not acknowledge self-ownership, and just accept that you can do anything you want to yourself."
Not the worst idea... but should someone who has done this have an absolute right to compete in a league with people who agreed not to do this, at least in certain ways?
There's a difference between saying it's illegal to take steroids and saying that if you take steroids, you aren't allowed to compete in the olympics or other sports leagues.
There's a difference between saying it's illegal to take steroids and saying that if you take steroids, you aren't allowed to compete in the olympics or other sports leagues.
Right, a given sports league should certainly be able to say "we don't allow PEDs" (or cybernetic augmentation or exoskeletons or whatever), while a different league might say "run whatcha brung."
Likewise, the world doesn't owe the PED taking athlete a venue to compete with his PED taking peers. If such a league forms, it forms... if it doesn't, then so be it.
But then again we're asking a lot of people in a lot of jobs to fuck up their bodies in order to make a living. Think about jobs involving large amounts of manual labor. However, even hackers have job hazards like repetitive strain injury. At the end of the day, being a professional athlete is just a job.
There's no way that opening this door to athletes would end well. Once the first story comes out that some guys heart exploded during a race due to doping, the whole thing would be shut down.
My previous personal trainer was Netherland's best 'natural' (undoped) body builder.
It works fairly well and the cheating is, similarly to say a Tour de France, limited to the extent it can go undetected by drug testing.
It is however looked down on and seen as 'the minor leagues' in practice and switching to the 'doped league' later in the game just doesn't work as there's a surprisingly large amount of skill involved in doping up effectively.
While insiders (and outsiders) are prone to quibble about specifics, I think most people understand and basically agree with arguments for anti enhancement rules.
Things start to get very fuzzy when/if previously banned enhancements start becoming common among non athletes. Hormone treatments to slow or reverse aging, aid recovery, improve body fat levels and such. If a drug can improve stamina in athletes, a milder dose will probably be a nice enhancement for ordinary people. If everyone is taking a drug that makes you more alert and patient, it's weird that athletes aren't allowed to take it. If everyone is doing anti aging hormone treatments to look 40 at 60, it seems ridiculous when a tennis players retires at 31 for want of those hormones.
Competing athletes will "abuse" these enhancements in the sense that they will go well beyond what doctors will recommend. But, you could say that doctors' recommendations take into account the median cost benefit considerations and athletes are at the extreme. In any case, athletes abuse their bodies in other ways. They train well past the optimal (in terms of health) levels. It's obviously not good for your head to get punched 500 times per week, but boxers do it.
Anyway, when your mother can toss a judo player into a second story window, watching the olympics will seem pretty quaint.
I would like to see an Olympic Games that make no assumption as to what the competitors are made of. A competition where robots are allowed to compete as much as humans. To avoid injuries to human athletes, you would probably have to limit it to sports where competitors don't interact with one another, but it would be interesting to see the evolution over the years as robots get better than humans.
Picture this, while regulars can't go down the 9s barrier in 100mts dash, in the powerlympics they would easily break that record year after year, all the records will fall like a house of cards bringing more enthusiasm, more money and more advertisement. What's not to like?
Who knows what scientists might be able to develop that would have other uses if they could focus on doing it openly and safely.
We shouldn't kid ourselves that chemists aren't working on this stuff at the moment but they're having to focus on stopping detection as well as pure performance and have to conceal what they do (not the greatest way to advance science).
But surely the toughest thing is the atheletes. How can you really get informed consent for stuff which is going to be that far out on the bleeding edge, particularly from someone who, let's put this kindly, has a far greater focus on their physical than their mental development?
As a D1 athlete (track & cross-country), I've put a lot of thought into this sort of question. My conclusion is that sports are inherently unfair. This may sound like a strange thought coming from someone who has been running competitively for a good portion of my life, but I believe it is the truth.
People are born with a lot of genetic variation. I realize that no matter how hard I train, I will never run 5,000m in less than 13 minutes. It's not a matter of increasing dedication or anything like that -- it's simply getting the right genes. Even in high school and college, you see the people with the best genes rise to the top with significantly less effort.
So why would I participate in something that rewards luck? Because it's not entirely luck, and the further away from an elite athlete you are, the less luck matters. A high school runner with poor innate running ability can easily beat the most gifted runner by working hard and training correctly. It's because even those born with low potential have a huge range in which they can improve, before they begin reaching their genetic limit. In fact, I would argue that very few people ever come close to reaching their limit.
So I can appreciate that even though there is still an unfairness in how hard different athletes have to work to achieve the same goal, the goal that matters in competition (winning) is really determined by those who are the most dedicated and committed at the more local levels of a sport. (Of course, we could get into the debate that hard work and commitment are also genetic traits, in which case the whole thing becomes a crapshoot, but I'll leave that question for another time).
Now, elite athletes are nothing like normal people. Almost every single one of them has hit (or is very close to) their genetic limit. They're at a point where more, or different types of training just won't do anything. At that point, "winning" comes down to a genetic lottery. Which is kind of sad, because these people have spent their whole lives working for something where achieving it depends mostly on chance. I assume most of them either don't recognize this or (more likely) don't care. There is a third option though... recognizing this and fixing it. This is where drugs come in. My first thought is that these high performance drugs "fix" what was never fair to begin with. But the problem is that sports weren't designed this way. When these athletes began their decades of training, they recognized what the rules of the game were. Like a board game, there's some element of luck and some element of skill. And because they knew the rules of this game very well before they began competing, I can't condone anyone using drugs to make the game more fair, because the other competitors never agreed to this.
Simply put, it's cheating. And the majority of the world (at least for the moment) thinks cheating is immoral. So we should continue to ban athletes that don't play by the rules of the game, regardless of the fact that they are trying to make the game more fair for themselves.
What are the pitfalls to breaking these rules? You're cheating all of the other players in the game, who never agreed to let you break the rules. You're cheating the fans of the game. You're stealing money (highly competitive sports have large amounts of money involved for the winners).
Now, if somebody wants to create a new game, with new rules, by all means go ahead. I personally wouldn't take an interest in this manner of competing, but I'm sure there are many who would. And they would be doing it morally.
This truth has been understood for thousands of years. It's only with the coddling that has been going on in recent generations that it feels like a revelation.
I think this is inevitable, when the body has a limit, people will look for ways to push those limits. Augmenting and enhancing the human body has to be considered and may end up being beneficial for other purposes. I prefer bionic myself ;)
A similar story is told from a somewhat different perspective in Beggars in Spain, an excellent novel by Nancy Kress. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Having multiple categories doesn't really solve the problem. First, it divides the market, and second, anyone who uses enhancments and can get away with it in the unenhanced category still has an advantage.
Yeah, but extreme training plus lots of drugs is probably worse than extreme training on it's own, right? I mean, HGH could make extreme training healthier but it would probably be more than counterbalanced by steroids and the rest.
How would the modified classes be regulated, or would they? Would there be 100m stock, 100m GT and 100m Prototype, based on the types of enhancements and weight of the participant? Wow, imagine if the rules changed year to year. Like suppose you had folks in Prototype chopping off their noses to increase their power to weight ratios, and next year they increase the minimum weight and now you have to install ballast in your ass last minute to get your weight back up.