As the London Olympics approach, Saturday Night Live will no-doubt air a highlight-reel of their best sports sketches. And this classic from Dennis Miller's Weekend Update tenure had better be among them:
I thought of the All Drug Olympics when reading a feature in the most recent issue of Nature, called "Performance enhancement: Superhuman athletes." The writer sidesteps the ethical debate over the use by athletes of steroids and other performance boosters in order to engage in a speculative, "what if everything was permitted..." exploration of where current and near-future science might take human athletic performance.
For example, researchers have found that anabolic steroids can boost muscle strength by 38 percent in men and "potentially more in women." The advantages of human growth hormone are more nebulous, but the red-blood cell booster hormone EPO can increase stamina in endurance athletes by 34 percent (and apparently also boost their motivation to train).
The writer closes with a nod to performance boosters that aren't ingested, including prosthetic limbs that might leave natural arms and legs choking on their dust. We hear from Hugh Herr, a biomedical engineer at MIT who is working on a "bionic running leg" and is quoted in favor of devising new sports that treat high-performing prosthetic limbs as sports equipment and thereby create a new class of enhanced competitions. "Just like the invention of the bicycle led to the sport of cycling," Herr says, "What we will see is the emergence of all kinds of new sports."
The purist in me wants to object -- if we want to see people go faster around a track with the help of technology, we already have NASCAR. But the realist in me can totally see this happening. Without some help from chemistry, technology, or bio-engineering, the days of Faster, Higher, Stronger are numbered in many of the Olympics' marquee events.
I thought of the All Drug Olympics when reading a feature in the most recent issue of Nature, called "Performance enhancement: Superhuman athletes." The writer sidesteps the ethical debate over the use by athletes of steroids and other performance boosters in order to engage in a speculative, "what if everything was permitted..." exploration of where current and near-future science might take human athletic performance.
For example, researchers have found that anabolic steroids can boost muscle strength by 38 percent in men and "potentially more in women." The advantages of human growth hormone are more nebulous, but the red-blood cell booster hormone EPO can increase stamina in endurance athletes by 34 percent (and apparently also boost their motivation to train).
The writer closes with a nod to performance boosters that aren't ingested, including prosthetic limbs that might leave natural arms and legs choking on their dust. We hear from Hugh Herr, a biomedical engineer at MIT who is working on a "bionic running leg" and is quoted in favor of devising new sports that treat high-performing prosthetic limbs as sports equipment and thereby create a new class of enhanced competitions. "Just like the invention of the bicycle led to the sport of cycling," Herr says, "What we will see is the emergence of all kinds of new sports."
The purist in me wants to object -- if we want to see people go faster around a track with the help of technology, we already have NASCAR. But the realist in me can totally see this happening. Without some help from chemistry, technology, or bio-engineering, the days of Faster, Higher, Stronger are numbered in many of the Olympics' marquee events.
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