University of Pennsylvania bioethics professor Arthur Caplan has a provocative piece in the British Journal of Sports Medicine entitled "Does the the biomedical revolution spell the end of sport?". Here's an excerpt:
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But, what if biomedical science could put the safety issue [of steroids] aside? Someday, probably soon, there will be drugs that do what steroids do without any real risk of harm to the user. Forms of gene therapy are also being developed that will let us safely tweak ourselves and our offspring to perform athletic feats that are ’’swifter, higher and stronger’’ than ever before seen. Would the world still want the interventions banned? Would doctors who offered such techniques be acting immorally?
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Strangely, the greatest threat in to the future of sport is not necessarily new drugs, gene therapy or better chemistry. It may simply be that the more knowledge we gain about the hereditary and developmental factors involved, the greater the threat to our ability to value performance as a result of much other than random luck in the distribution of the hereditary materials that govern so much of who we are and what we can achieve.
Science does not destroy the possibility of effort but it may diminish our understanding of its role to the point where sport simply devolves into exhibition.
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To access the rest of the article, click here (there is a fee). For a related Sports Law Blog piece, check out Greg's posting "Performance Enhancing Drug or Air Conditioning?"
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