Genetically modified athletes: Forget drugs. There are even suggestions some Chinese athletes’ genes are altered to make them stronger

August 1st, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

By
John Naish

PUBLISHED:

19:28 EST, 31 July 2012

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UPDATED:

19:28 EST, 31 July 2012

The controversy over Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen’s astonishing gold medal performance this week is no longer confined to just the suspicions of drug abuse, which she emphatically denies.

It has raised concerns about another worrying — and infinitely more sinister — threat to the world of honest competition: the genetic enhancement of athletes.

John Leonard, the highly respected American director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, described the 16-year-old’s world-record-breaking performance as ‘suspicious’, ‘disturbing’ and ‘unbelievable’.

The record-breaking achievements of China’s 16-year-old Ye Shiwen in the Olympic swimming pool have caused some to suggest she is taking performance enhancing drugs

‘Any time someone has looked like superwoman in the history of our sport they have later been found guilty of doping,’ he added.

He went on to say that the authorities who tested Ye Shewin for drug abuse should also check to see ‘if there is something unusual going on in terms of genetic manipulation’.

A Chinese anti-doping official, Jiang Zhixue, described Leonard’s claims as completely unreasonable.
The astonishing suggestion seems to be that London 2012 may be the first Olympics in which competitors are attempting to cheat by altering their genes to build muscle and sinew, and boost their blood’s oxygen-carrying powers.

The chilling comment from one of the world’s top coaches seems to herald the possibility of Frankenstein athletes, of an unbeatable master-race of genetically manipulated super-competitors with enhanced lung-power, or heightened strength, or some other characteristic that enables them to snatch medal after medal from honest competitors.

And while this might appear to belong to the world of science-fiction, scientists are taking the threat seriously.

Dr Ted Friedmann, chair of the genetics panel of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said he ‘would not be surprised at all’ if gene enhancement were not now being secretly used by some competitors.

He has been working to find ways to detect ‘gene doping’ and prevent it from becoming common. ‘The technology is ripe for abuse,’ he warned.

But can athletes — or trainers — really enhance their performance through genetic means?

Ye Shiwen has improved her personal best times dramatically in the last few days, causing some to get suspicious of her methods to win Olympic gold

Laboratory experiments have already shown that the science can work. In 2005, Ronald Evans, a hormone expert working at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, showed how genetic modification can increase the athletic power of mice.

Evans produced a group of genetically modified mice with an increased amount of slow-twitch muscle fibre. This type of fibre is associated with strong cardiovascular muscles and boosts an athlete’s endurance.

Evans’s mice could run for an hour longer than normal mice, were resistant to weight gain no matter what they were fed on, and remained at peak fitness even when they took no exercise. A form of genetic modification is already being tested in medicine, in the form of gene therapy for diseases such as cystic fibrosis.

Most gene modification techniques
involve placing genetically modified DNA inside a virus and injecting it
into the human body. The virus then enters human cells, and its
modified DNA attaches itself to the human DNA inside those cells.

Gene
therapy is at a very early stage in development and has become possible
as a result of our discovery in 2003 of how to map the human genome.

China’s Ye Shiwen has won two gold medals so far, an incredible achievement for one relatively unknown in the sport a year ago

This meant we could identify specific genes that cause disease — cystic fibrosis is caused by one faulty gene, for example, and the idea is that gene therapy can replace the faulty gene with one that works.

In the same way, it may well be possible for athletes to use a virus to introduce a gene that spurs the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells or muscle-building hormones. And the heightened blood-cell counts or hormone levels might simply appear to the doping agencies to be the product of an extraordinary athlete’s body.

Tests are being developed to detect
this kind of manipulation, but at the moment, the World Anti-Doping
Agency does not have one.

Anna
Baoutina, a senior research scientist at the National Measurement
Institute in Sydney, told the Tackling Doping In Sport conference in
London earlier this year that no gene test was in place for the 2012
Olympics.

‘The major
advantage of gene doping is that it is very difficult to detect compared
to drug doping. The doping gene is very similar to natural cells found
in the body,’ she told journalists. ‘We are developing methods to fight
it.’

Clare Balding was one of the first to raise the possibility of doping at the Olympics, when she asked pundit Mark Foster ‘How many questions will there be over somebody who can swim so much faster than she has ever swum before’

Olympics leaders say, however, that they are confident they will soon be able to detect the first generations of genetically super-powered cheats.

For example, Patrick Schamasch, medical director of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has said that the viruses used to smuggle genes into the body leave behind traces which can be detected. But this will probably not be the case for long, he warned: ‘I’m certain viruses will be invented that won’t leave traces.’

Instead, Olympics officials are banking on the success of their newly introduced ‘biological passport’. This keeps track of the athlete’s overall physiological profile, and triggers alarm if anything about it changes in a suspicious manner — for example if their everyday hormone levels take an unusual leap.

Many scientists, though, question the authorities’ confidence in their ability to catch dopers and point out that cheats are already using biological methods to avoid detection.

In particular they are concerned about the lack of a test for an increasingly popular form of cheating — a blood transfusion where athletes store pints of their own blood and re-inject them later, before a race, for example.

Arne Ljungqvist, the anti-doping chief of the IOC, has disclosed that about 100 samples from the Athens Games in 2004 had been retested and six athletes who competed have been identified as possible drug cheats

This boosts the number of oxygen-carrying red cells in the blood, improving power and stamina. But it is hard to detect such transfusions, because they involve the athlete’s own blood, so don’t contain traces of any foreign body. The WADA has funded research into developing a test for the transfusions, but it is still not ready.

Professor Dominic Wells, a gene therapy researcher who has studied the possibility of modifying athletes, believes we are still some way off being able to use genes to significantly change athletes’ performance.

‘There is a real possibility, however, that this will work for athletes in the future because we have some of the best brains in medicine working on it,’ he says.

If genetic manipulation does become common, the Olympic doping authorities at least have time on their side.

New cheating methods will always remain undetected until the authorities develop scientific methods of spotting them. Olympic chiefs have therefore decided to keep medal-winners’ blood samples for eight years, so they can subject them to new tests when they are developed.

Last week, for example, Arne Ljungqvist, the anti-doping chief of the International Olympic Committee, disclosed that about 100 samples from the Athens Games in 2004 had been retested — and six athletes who competed have been identified as possible drug cheats. ‘The longer you wait the better, if you want to catch someone,’ he said.

There is, however, a real penalty to pay for this. Whenever we cheer a new champion on the podium, we must always wonder whether their shiny medal will be taken back in ignominy years down the line.

The idea of retrospective testing tarnishes Olympic achievement. But if that is the price we have to pay to keep the spectre of genetically-modified, unbeatable Franken-athletes at bay, then sadly, it does seem to be worth paying.