Green, during an interview, brought up Hall of Fame hitter Wade Boggs, whose superior eyesight must have contributed to his lifetime .328 batting average. Maybe a safe and effective gene swap can give virtually any child 20/15 vision. Such techniques almost surely will be developed sooner or later, Green says, though for reasons that have little to do with picking up the seams on 100 mph fastballs (or maybe 150 mph fastballs, if pitchers also are genetically enhanced by then). And we will almost inevitably be pushed beyond current performance limits in a new era of “directed evolution.” In this scenario, future Berkeley gymnasts might compete using fundamentally better components than those so prone to breakdown in McNeill and his peers.

The idea of bioengineered superjoints and high-tech performance muscles, perhaps even built into children before they’re born, has long been fodder for science fiction writers. And like time travel and androids, messing with the human genome is to many people a disturbing notion. “There is something unsettling about the specter of genetically altered athletes lifting SUVs or hitting 650-foot home runs,” notes Michael Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard and author of The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. It pushes right up against some of our basic ideas of human value. We accept that we have defects, and that our humanity has something to do with our drive to overcome what limits us.

But a little tinkering with what’s inside us doesn’t sound immediately off-putting if you happen to be an elite athlete struggling to stay healthy. “I would have to think about the ethical issues around that, but at first thought it sounds like a pretty good idea,” McNeill says. “With every injury I’ve had, I’ve just prayed and hoped there was a quick fix to it. There hardly ever is. In terms of biologically altering joints and muscles to prevent injuries, I think that could be a step in the right direction for gymnastics, because a lot of the time at big competitions it’s not the best gymnast that wins. It’s the healthiest gymnast that wins.”

At the northern edge of San Francisco, where the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands dominate about as perfect a view as anyone could engineer, people who have served this country in uniform now arrive at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center to get treatment for their wounds. Dr. Hubert Kim, director of a cartilage repair and regeneration project at UCSF and the San Francisco VAMC, has no lack of clients for his studies.

Kim and his colleagues are among the pioneers of a new era of gene-based medicine. They are studying the mechanisms of muscle atrophy—how genes and their regulatory molecules kick in and degrade the muscles after an injury or surgery. “Say you’re laid up, you’re in a cast, or you’re an athlete who’s had an ACL reconstruction. Almost immediately your muscles undergo atrophy, and it takes a long time to build up those muscles again,” he says.

Transgenic mice have been developed that lack some of the gene products implicated in muscle atrophy. When these mice are experimentally given the equivalent of an Achilles’ tendon blowout, they recover muscle strength in half the time as ordinary mice. The goal now is to find some way to knock out these genes in humans without doing more harm than good. Kim’s focus is on helping patients recover normal function, not on helping star athletes get an edge. But the implications for sports seem pretty obvious. “The goal is to identify therapeutic targets to delay the progression of atrophy after an injury. So maybe an athlete could lose half as much muscle and therefore get back in the game sooner, just because he hasn’t lost as much,” Kim says. This could be done rather simply, without much controversy, if it turns out that a safe and effective treatment is found and used solely to limit harm and to speed recovery from an injury.

Some tricky questions arise, however, when such interventions cross over from treatment into performance enhancement. It’s entirely possible that a method to limit muscle atrophy after an injury could be beneficial to a healthy athlete trying to get stronger in a hurry. “The injury recovery piece is one thing, and how to enhance performance is another,” says Dr. Tom Vail, chief of orthopedics at UCSF. “It’s such a gray area. Altering physiology—that is essentially what elite training does, in the most positive sense.”

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