Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

  At the 1996 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Sport, the distinguished Roger Bannister, the first breaker of the four-minute mile, decided to weigh in on differences between blacks and whites—a subject outside his expertise. Blacks had a “natural advantage,” in running, Sir Roger claimed, as if an entire race of people were born with sneakers on. He wasn’t alone in idiotically, and reprehensibly, holding forth on the topic: “The black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way,” sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder observed in a notorious 1988 television interview. “This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade…the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid.” Jack Nicklaus was once asked why there were so few blacks among the elite ranks of golfers. “They have different muscles that react in different ways,” he said.

  Sports commentators have long played on the specious differences: White athletes are hardworking, black athletes are amazing physical specimens; whites are smart, blacks are talented; whites are team players, blacks are showboaters. In his 2000 book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, a kind of sports entry in the race and culture wars of the period, Jon Entine—a journalist, not a scientist—delivered what he called a “biocultural” explanation that “biological factors specific to populations can exaggerate the impact of small but critical anatomical differences.” He observed that athletes of African ancestry hold every major running record, from the 100-meter dash to the marathon. “Genes may not determine who are the world’s best runners, but they do circumscribe possibility,” he wrote.

  While he had his supporters, including his sometime collaborator Tom Brokaw, Entine quickly drew a varied and expert set of critics. “If professional excellence or over-representation could be regarded as evidence for genetic superiority,” Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist at Berkeley, wrote in the New York Times, “there would be strong implications for Jewish comedy genes and Irish policeman genes.” The science about the relationship between genetics and performance was still too vague, he claimed. “We could document consistent differences in physical features, acts and accomplishments until the Second Coming and be entirely wrong in thinking they’re genetically based.” Essayist Jim Holt wickedly opened a review of Entine’s book with the conclusions about sporting and genetic makeup from an earlier period:

  It is pretty obvious that certain racial and ethnic groups are naturally gifted at playing certain sports. Take basketball. That’s a Jewish sport. So, at any rate, people thought in the 1930s. After all, the star captain of the original New York Celtics, Nat Holman, was Jewish, as were four of the starters among St. John’s famed “wonder five,” who ruled college basketball in the late ’20s. Jews were believed to have a genetic edge, being endowed by nature with superior balance, greater speed and sharper eyes—not to mention, in the words of one sportswriter, a “scheming mind” and “flashy trickiness.”

  (If only my own flashy trickiness, along with my usurious ways and abiding appetite for virgin Christian blood, translated into dunk-ability. Scheming gets you only so high.)

  Still, the issue whether African-Americans were naturally superior in some sports has flummoxed many, including Arthur Ashe. “Damn it,” Ashe once said. “My heart says ‘no,’ but my head says ‘yes.’ Sociology can’t explain it. I want to hear from the scientists. Until I see some numbers [to the contrary], I have to believe that we blacks have something that gives us an edge.”

  So what does scientific research tell us about genetics, race, and athletic ability? Or, put less delicately, can a white guy like me dunk?

  On the face of it, the answer is obviously yes. White guys do it in high school gyms every day across the country. But the very question—asking whether a white guy can dunk—fundamentally misunderstands why some of us appear naturally better at things than others. “ ‘Race’ is the wrong term,” for thinking about these issues, Harvard evolutionary biologist Dan Lieberman tells me. Muscle development has nothing to do with the color of one’s skin. But scientists have noted common characteristics among “biological populations,” or people from different parts of the world, says Lieberman. In other words, we ought to separate race from our ancestral geography, just as we might distinguish a man’s clothes from his politics. Just because someone appears to be black (or white or brown or whatever) doesn’t mean we can draw any conclusions about her physical abilities. Knowing where her ancestors came from can sometimes offer hints. The genealogy of some top-notch long-distance runners, for instance, has been traced to a particular Kenyan valley; some sprinters’ family trees find their roots in specific parts of West Africa. “You have more individuals in those populations better built for power than endurance,” says Lieberman.

  Just because you or your forebears hail from Côte d’Ivoire obviously does not mean you are going to be a particularly good sprinter. But, says Lieberman, certain pockets of the West African population are more likely than others to have what’s known as the speed gene, alpha-actinin-3, or ACTN3, a protein found exclusively in fast-twitch muscles. Fast-twitch muscles produce more force more quickly than slow-twitch muscles; squid use theirs to shoot out tentacles to catch prey, we use ours to sprint after a bus. The downside is that they’re quicker to tire than their slow-twitch counterparts, which can withstand repeated contractions over a long period of time without lactic acid buildup; these are the muscles that mussels use to cling long and hard to slippery, briny rock as they’re relentlessly beaten about by waves. For similar reasons, the turtle beats the hare.

  —

  Michael Bárány weighed only 92 pounds when the Americans liberated Buchenwald in April 1945. “I was just of bone,” he would tell an interviewer from the Shoah Foundation a half-century later. Raised the son of a well-to-do farmer outside Budapest, he was denied admission to university for his Jewishness and as young man had found work as a mechanic in a Hungarian army factory. In late 1944 he and other Jewish mechanics were directed to a train depot and told that they were being dispatched for a military operation. They were in fact being sent to a death camp. They were given a two-day supply of food to endure a 21-day journey in a boxcar—some of the ninety men, including Bárány, resorted to drinking their own urine. “Hunger, smell, and disease transformed the cattle wagon into hell,” he later wrote. By the time they were dragged out of the boxcar, one of the men had died and two of them could not walk. The others were made to march through the Buchenwald gates, above them the taunting slogan “Jedem das Seine,” or, roughly, “Everyone gets what he deserves.” It was Christmas Day, 1944.

  After the liberation, Bárány, 23 years old, weakened by tuberculosis, remained nearly a month at the camp to recuperate. He then made his way back to Hungary, where he learned his parents had been gassed in Auschwitz. He had grown up an Orthodox Jew, but God had been wrung out by the Holocaust. “I tell you when I lost God,” he told the Shoah interviewer. “I lost God first when I heard my parents saying God would help. And when I became a scientist, a life scientist, then I couldn’t find God anymore.” By September 1945, determined to establish a new life for himself, he enrolled in university.

  Bárány specialized in medicine. He met Kate Fóti, a fellow student, when she came into his dormitory to get first aid after she cut her finger slicing some bread. Within months they were married. She would become his lifelong scientific collaborator. After winning his medical degree, Bárány turned to biochemistry, drawn to the lab of a Hungarian Nobel Prize winner. He began to study the lives of muscles, and how and why they contract. I like to think of this man, whose formative years were spent suffering at the hands of the most inhumane ideologues, concentrating his meticulous study on what seems to me to be our inner humanity: the source of both our grace and our power, the tools that control everything from the gesture with which we soothe a child to the vigor with which we dunk a basketball.

  Bu
t he faced a second kind of prejudice after getting his doctorate in 1956. He found himself unable to teach under Communist rule because of his father’s prewar landholder status—no matter that his family land had been wrested away by the Fascists. He was deemed a capitalist. Lacking opportunity, the Báránys plotted to flee the country. The border was mined, watched, and wired. “So escape was not absolutely simple,” Bárány later observed.

  At one point the couple paid a former secret police officer to help them escape, but he was arrested. In another scheme, they were to be smuggled aboard a coal barge departing Budapest for Vienna, but the Danube froze and the ship was jammed. They finally engaged a guide to help them cross the woodsy border into Yugoslavia. He steered them to a spot where a cow had stepped on a land mine and been blown up, thus creating a zone for safe passage. The family—Michael, a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough; Kate, seven months’ pregnant now; and George, their 22-month-old toddler—trudged through ten miles of snow, zigzagging through the night to dodge the border guards. Bárány carried two suitcases, one filled with food, the other with diplomas and lab notebooks. Family lore had it that at the end of this harrowing trek, the boy, who had been sedated with a sleeping pill and carried for the first few miles before being made to walk, told his parents upon their arrival in Yugoslavia “Jól sétáltunk”—“That was a nice walk.”*

  In 1960, after stints in Israel and Germany, the family finally settled in the United States. Living in the fringes of Queens, the Báránys left their house so early for work that by the time their boys awoke they had only a governess to greet them. They were dutiful sons: their mother made them a poster of 17 good reasons to do push-ups, and the boys did push-ups routinely upon getting out of bed each morning. (Not far away lived my grandparents, themselves refugees from Vienna.) The Báránys’ destination each morning was Manhattan’s Institute for Muscle Disease, where they worked on teams trying to cure muscular dystrophy, a disease of progressive weakness, often first seen in children, that hampers locomotion. The Báránys were “inadvertent comparative biochemists,” they would later say, examining the muscle contractions in rabbits, chickens, and frogs. It was in New York, doing these experiments, that Michael Bárány made his most acclaimed discovery, of a relationship between the speed of muscle contraction and the breaking down of energy-bearing molecules inside the muscle. The finding, one that characterized the difference between “fast-twitch” and “slow-twitch” muscles, was laid out in a 1967 Journal of General Physiology article that has now been cited more than 1,700 times. Nearly a half-century later, this was the difference I was hoping to navigate in my own training as I steered my body to be fast-twitch heavy.

  In the mid-1970s, the Báránys found work in the biochemistry department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their partnership led to many joint publications—72 full papers and a dozen book chapters. “To my parents, science was a safe haven because it could not be taken away, as so much else had been,” George would later say. “Science was logical and predictable in a world where they had experienced so much suffering based on the arbitrary prejudices and madness of human beings.” George and his brother, Francis, both prodigies (one graduated from Stuyvesant High School at 16 and went straight to graduate school), became scientists in their own right. At Chicago, Kate and Michael Bárány walked to work together every day; they became known on campus as “the professors who held hands.”

  Kate died in June 2011; Michael, six weeks later.

  —

  To understand the relationship between the speed gene and muscle performance, you need to understand something about how muscles work. Muscles are the body’s most bounteous type of tissue, and arguably the most trainable. They are like sets of Russian nesting dolls, with one biological structure nestled within another. Every muscle fiber, as long as a foot but thinner than a strand of hair, is composed of long tubes called myofibrils. These, in turn, are made up of thin and thick protein filaments running in parallel. Every muscle fiber, be it fast- or slow-twitch, has both sets of proteins. A muscle contracts when the thick set of protein filaments grabs the thin set; because the thin set of filaments is attached to the end of a muscle fiber component, the entire fiber is thus shortened.

  A biology researcher once explained it this way in the magazine Nature: Picture yourself standing between two hefty bookcases. These bookcases, being in the basement of a massive archive, are on rails so they can be easily moved. It’s your job, standing between them, to bring the bookcases together, but you’re limited to using only your arms and ropes hanging down from each bookcase. (Your arms are the thick filaments; the ropes are the thin filaments; the bookcases are the ends of the muscle fiber.) Standing between the bookcases, you pull on the two ropes—one per arm—that are tied tight to each bookcase. In a repetitive fashion, you yank each rope toward you, re-grasp it, and then yank again. Eventually, as you make your way through the length of each rope, the bookcases move together.

  This effort—of pulling bookcases together in a stuffy basement—is sweaty business. It requires energy, especially if you want to tug those ropes (that is, contract your muscles) quickly—this was the relationship that Bárány had illuminated. Flush with mitochondria—the little power centers within each cell that use oxygen gas to convert sugar into chemical energy molecules—slow-twitch muscles can perform low-intensity exercises for long stretches. Thus, the Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie, at one point the holder of 27 world records, has muscles that are likely beefsteak-red, juiced with oxygenated blood. Fast-twitch muscles, on the other hand, are short on mitochondria. Were we to peel away Usain Bolt’s skin like an onion, we would likely see a paler, whiter set of muscles—something like the color of pork. When a burst of energy is required, rather than undertake the plodding oxidation method of their slow-twitch counterparts (also known as aerobic metabolism), these muscles quickly break down their large reserves of stored sugar via anaerobic metabolism, which is much faster but also much less efficient. Scientists think humans working at their maximum speeds can rely on non-oxidized forms of energy conversion (or anaerobic metabolism) for about 30-some seconds before lactic acid develops and muscle fatigue sets in. By then the fast-twitch muscles, contracting roughly twice as fast as their slow-twitch counterparts, have done their job, like overdrive on a sports car.

  Each of us is born with a certain ratio of fast- and slow-twitch fibers. That raw number does not change. But when we work out, our muscles clearly get bigger. That’s due to an increase in the number of those protein filaments within each fiber, not an increase in the number of fibers. So while the number of fibers is not changing, individual fibers are gaining protein and thus gaining in size. We can focus that growth within a certain fiber type: We can increase the size and strength of fast-twitch fibers or slow-twitch fibers, depending on the exercises and training we do (in my case, fast-twitch muscle training). This will not change a slow-twitch fiber into a fast-twitch fiber. Suppose your muscles are 50 percent of each. Training will not change that percentage, but it can make the fast-twitch fibers larger, so an entire muscle group like the biceps is now more than 50 percent fast-twitch by mass or bulk. That would make you more fast-twitchy even though the raw number of fibers of either type has not changed.

  Back to the speed gene: Scientists are still unsure exactly what ACTN3 contributes to the performance of fast-twitch muscles—and most think it pales as a determinant of athletic ability compared to training time and competitive will. But they suspect ACTN3 influences the speed with which we grab energy-bearing molecules to do work in explosive activity. Every one of us has two copies of the ACTN3 gene—or its variant, a mutant that coincides with a deficiency in the actin-building protein associated with fast-twitch muscles. (We have two copies because we inherit one copy of the gene or its variant from each of our parents.) So it follows that each of us has one of three possible pair combinations of these two genes: two ACTN3 genes, suggesting we’re predisposed for power events
; two mutant genes, suggesting we’re predisposed for endurance challenges, like long-distance running; or one of each, suggesting we might be decent—but not necessarily great—at both sorts of activities.

  Researchers have consistently found that power athletes have at least one, if not two, copies of ACTN3. In a 2008 paper in the journal Genetics and Microbiology, a team of Greek researchers reported that the ACTN3 gene showed up in the top power-oriented athletes considerably more often than in a representative random sample of the Greek population. Even among non-professionals the presence of the gene correlates with what might be called your twitchiness: Another Greek study—the Greeks, haunted by their long-faded Olympic glory, evidently obsess over the science of track and field—found that boys who lacked a copy of the ACTN3 gene were significantly slower in a 40-meter sprint. In a nutshell, the gene “has a predictive value if you’re fast-twitch dominant or not,” Lieberman, the Harvard biologist, told me.

  Still, a surfeit of fast-twitch or slow-twitch muscles does not mean you will be a great sprinter or a great long-distance runner. Training, courage, and tenacity play bigger roles. But Lieberman tried to disabuse me of my leaping hope. “If you never have had the great dominance of a fast-twitch athlete, you’ll never be a great fast-twitch athlete,” he said. And then, twisting the dagger with what I could swear was a bit of glee, he told me: “I’m willing to bet that you’ll never become a great jumper. The older you get, the harder it is to change that muscle fiber composition.”