The Next Sports Scandal: Genetically Engineered Olympic Athletes?

September 18, 2000
Gene Doping's Olympic Threat
By Stephen Moore and A. Craig Copetas
Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

SYDNEY, Australia -- And now, the specter of gene doping.
In an Olympics already strained over athletes who have tested positive for
performance-enhancing drugs and worries that others may be slipping by
undetected, comes even more discouraging news. Unless the International
Olympic Committee is willing to spend vast new sums on sophisticated
testing systems, it could find itself outwitted in a few years by a whole
new class of gene-spliced performance boosters that will make the current
crop of drugs seem like aspirin.

Genetically juiced superstars racing for gold medals might sound more like
they belong in the Frankenstein Games than the Olympics, but even Olympic
drug enforcer Patrick Schamasch will tell you that the technology is here now.
Of course, reputable science is putting it to beneficial use -- as an
experimental treatment for diabetes and certain blood disorders, among
other things. But in an era when some athletes are willing to risk
everything, including their health, for a shot at a gold medal, the gene
dopers can't be far behind.

"Gene doping will be the next issue," says Dr. Schamasch of the IOC's
fledgling World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA. "Injections of synthetic EPO
and human-growth hormone will be nothing by comparison. If somebody
increases the production of hormones by direct genetic manipulation -- what
are you going to do?" He adds, wearily: "And we're always a little bit
behind."

Looking for Answers

As the world now knows, EPO, or erythopoieten, is the latest rage in
hard-to-detect performance drugs -- a favorite of long-distance runners
because it boosts endurance. In a recent pre-Olympic swoop, WADA subjected
more than 2,000 elite athletes to out-of-competition drug screening. In
all, nearly 4,000 competitors will be tested during the Games -- including
400 athletes picked at random for a new EPO test said to be more sensitive
and accurate than previous diagnostics. Yet, for all the urine samples and
blood scans the IOC plans to conduct over the next two weeks, many have
questioned whether the IOC's drug effort is either intense enough or
reliable enough to put a real dent in drug cheating. Moreover, medical and
legal squabbles are bound to follow.

It is in this already discouraging, confrontational scrum that Dr.
Schamasch, a Swiss orthopedic surgeon, contemplates having to tackle a new
wave of even harder-to-track drug use. So to catch up, the IOC is
scrambling to thaw its traditionally frosty relations with pharmaceutical
companies. In recent months, Dr. Schamasch has picked up pointers by
huddling with scientists at Modex Theraputiques SA, a Lausanne,
Switzerland, biotech firm that is racing to genetically engineer human
cells to produce EPO. The cells would then be transplanted into patients
undergoing kidney dialysis or suffering from blood diseases where EPO could
be a lifesaver.

The project is still at an experimental stage, but according to Modex
cofounder Patrick Aebischer, the company expects soon to begin clinical
trials. Could the technique be used as a doping method? Yes, says Dr.
Aebischer. Could it be detected? Yes, he replies, but "it would have to be
a rather sophisticated test."

He points out something else: Human-growth hormone, another banned
substance that boosts strength, can now be produced through similar genetic
manipulation and in that form "would be much more difficult to detect."
That's probably just the tip of the gene-doping iceberg. Bengt Saltin, a
researcher at the University of Copenhagen's Muscle Research Center, says
researchers world-wide are poring over DNA data from the Human Genome
Project to pinpoint genes for arcane "growth factors" that control the size
of muscle fiber and muscle mass. Pharmaceutical and biotech firms want to
parlay that knowledge into treatments against everything from muscular
dystrophy to occupational disorders. "But it would be easy to inject DNA
coding for these growth factors directly into muscles of athletes that want
to improve their performance," Dr. Saltin adds.

Sensitive Matters

This dichotomy -- the abuse of beneficial drugs for sports purposes -- has
no doubt sometimes hampered the IOC's sometimes fitful drug policy.
Unsurprisingly, pharmaceutical giants are prone to distance themselves from
misuse of their medicines. Two years ago, Dr. Schamasch tried to shame
producers of EPO and human-growth hormone into adding a marker molecule to
the drugs to make them easy to detect in lab tests. "I told the companies
that doping is bad publicity for them -- like the Bhopal disaster for Union
Carbide Corp." he says.

The gambit flopped largely because Dr. Schamasch overlooked a not-so-small
point: adding markers would have forced companies to conduct new rounds of
clinical trials costing tens of millions of dollars.

Yet scientists have often grumbled that the IOC has sometimes been
notoriously reluctant to dig into its deep pockets to fund antidoping
research. Peter Soenksen, a London endocrinologist, recalls that, as late
as the 1994 Winter Games, the IOC was basically "hostile" to antidoping
research he and collaborators were proposing. By 1996, though, as doping
became increasingly sophisticated and the IOC floundered in attempts to
crack down, that hostility softened. That year, the IOC even agreed to
match a $1 million research grant that Dr. Soenksen and others won from the
European Union to develop a growth-hormone detection test.

The three-year project involving blood samples from more than 700 athletes
isolated a spate of biochemical markers that unmask growth-hormone abuse.
But early last year, the IOC turned down a request by the group for an
additional $5 million in funding that researchers said would have allowed
them to refine the technique. The IOC's Dr. Schamasch says the
growth-hormone test wasn't very well described "and external experts
recommended against continuing with it."

Nonetheless, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch last month declared that
a test for human-growth hormone was just a few months away. His curious
announcement, Olympic officials suggest, was a counterpunch to mounting
political pressure on the IOC and had little to do with scientific reality.

A Cry for Action

Growing alarm about epidemic abuse of performance-enhancing drugs exploded
last year with a handful of Western governments joined forces to create
WADA. For Gen. Barry McCaffery, the U.S. national drug-policy director and
driving force behind the creation of WADA, governments needed to step in
because the IOC was failing to win the dope war.

WADA looks to be a novel partnership, with the IOC sharing power with
politicians unburdened by fealty to Mr. Samaranch. But money may turn out
to be a critical issue. The IOC agreed to provide the agency's initial
grubstake of $25 million. But some think, with gene-doping on the horizon,
that's just a drop in the bucket if the WADA is serious about bringing drug
abuse under control.

One ambitious proposal floating about would be to test, say, not just all
of the thousands of athletes who will compete in the next Olympics but also
extend testing down to the dozen or so serious contenders for each Olympic
spot. With each sample in international out-of-competition testing already
costing $400 to $500 to collect and process, such a system could add tens
of millions of dollars to WADA's annual testing tab.

Canadian IOC member and WADA boss Richard Pound envisions a more focused
program -- testing the top 100 athletes in each of the Olympic sports. "By
targeting the ones you really want to be sure of, you can increase the
statistical chances of being caught enough to make it a serious deterrent,"
he says.

To skeptics that sounds like just more excuses. Charles Yesalis, a
professor of health and human development at Pennsylvania State University,
calls the sums spent by the IOC on research so far "chump change." Dr.
Yesalis insists WADA "should recruit world-class biochemists to a truly
independent research affiliate, funded to the tune of $50 million to $100
million. "If you don't see dramatic progress after three to five years,
throw up your hands and get the hell out of the business," he adds.

Write to Stephen Moore at stephen.moore@wsj.com and
A. Craig Copetas at craig.copetas@wsj.com