Hacking Darwin

by Jamie Metzl

  About three fourths of Kenyan running champions are Kalenjins, a tiny group making up only 4.4 million of Kenya’s 41 million people. Kalenjin runners won 84 percent of Kenya’s sixty-four Olympic and eight world-championship medals between 1964 and 2012 and were responsible for twenty of Kenya’s fastest twenty-five marathon times.5 The majority of these Kalenjin runners come from the even smaller Nandi subtribe, a group of about a million people in total. While this running success reflects lots of hard work, a national running culture, and other environmental factors, the genetic foundation of Kalenjin dominance is hard to miss.

  Kalenjin runners have on average longer legs, shorter torsos, thinner limbs, and less mass in relation to height than most everyone else, to which anyone who’s ever watched a competitive marathon over past decades can attest. Swedish researchers testing Kalenjin children in 1990 found remarkably that over five hundred Kalenjin schoolboys could run two thousand meters faster than Sweden’s fastest champion. After researchers from a Danish sports science institute trained a large group of Kalenjin boys for three months in 2000, many allegedly ran faster than a leading Danish runner.6

  Although no single marathon gene has been or will likely be discovered, researchers have identified the important influence over two hundred genes can have in athletic performance.7 A 2008 study that assessed the possibility of a given runner having each of the twenty-three best-understood of these athleticism-related genes concluded it would be extremely small, about 0.0005 percent of all people. If that’s true, that would mean that China, with its 2018 population of 1.34 billion people, would have 6,700 people with these genetic attributes spread across all age groups. The United States, with its population of 324 million, would have 1,620.

  Imagine a country—let’s say China—decided to use the data it is already collecting when sequencing its newborns to determine which among them would have the greatest chance to be star athletes of one type or another. The genetic potential could be flagged to parents and sports associations, who might be encouraged to give these children special opportunities to participate in sports where they might have some type of advantage. Those children demonstrating the greatest aptitude and passion for a given sport could be invited to join special leagues, where the best players could be encouraged or required to attend special sports schools and receive rigorous additional training. The best among these genetic stars would be identified to represent the country internationally. A bit of this is already happening.

  When attending women’s volleyball semifinals in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, I noticed a strange contrast between the American and Chinese athletes. The Americans were a hodgepodge of various shapes and sizes. In the American model, young athletes are often self-starters or the children of obsessive parents. Some of the American players, I am sure, had levels of heart, determination, team spirit, or charisma that had brought them to the Olympics. The Chinese, on the other hand, were far more uniform in appearance. Like the Soviets decades before, the Chinese often identify potential athletes based on physical attributes at an early age and then train and cull them through special sports schools around the country. Critics may not like this sports-school model, particularly when families have been coerced to give up their children to these schools, but few would call identifying young athletes for athletic potential cheating.

  The Beijing volleyball competition was not just between two teams but also between two different forms of societal organization. It may be that the American individualist system proves better able to create dominant athletes, the Chinese and Russian statist systems may do better, or some hybrid of the two will carry the day. Over time, however, this will not remain a theoretical point. Athletic success will be measured in the ongoing arms race of Olympic medals.

  Bringing advanced genetic capabilities to the sports arms race won’t just create new opportunities for cheaters but also challenge our conceptions of what constitutes fair play. People have long complained that the state-sponsored doping of athletes in the Soviet bloc countries, Russia, China, and elsewhere—and athletes like cyclist Lance Armstrong, who artificially stimulated his body’s production of red blood cells to boost hemoglobin levels—were cheating. They were, according the rules of their sports.

  At some point in the near future, athletes will be able to have their cells extracted and gene edited then reintroduced to their bodies to increase endurance and speed up muscular repair.8 This type of “gene doping” will clearly be cheating, based on the current rules in most sports. But now that we can look under the genetic hood, is it fair for a person without an extra hemoglobin-producing mutation to compete against someone who has it? What do we think about people like Mäntyranta, whose bodies are, on their own, doing what the cheaters are seeking to mimic? Are athletes like Lance Armstrong committing a violation by artificially boosting their hemoglobin production or just leveling the playing field by “Mäntyranta-ing” themselves?

  The more genetic predispositions for relative success in certain sports can be identified, the less fair it will be for athletes without them. But because all humans are genetically different from each other, penalizing an athlete for having an advantageous genetic difference would be like penalizing a physicist for having a genetic predisposition for strong math skills or a musician for having perfect pitch.

  Once we understand these genetic differences that give some athletes an inborn genetic advantage over others, one response might be to categorize athletes by their genetic differences, where people like Eero Mäntyranta could compete against each other, and people like Lance Armstrong could do the same. Kalenjin runners could likewise race against each other and we’d have a different competition for everyone else. This would be entirely absurd for many reasons, not least because physical diversity is the essence of competitive sports and because it would be impossible to determine which particular set of genetic attributes created the greatest chance of success. Alternatively, we might divide athletes into categories of genetically altered and genetically unadulterated.

  Whatever we do, will people be more drawn to the nongenetically selected and unenhanced athletes with their slower times and decreased performance or to the enhanced superathletes who continually break records and expand our concepts of what humans can achieve?

  Olympic champions, professional athletes, and other sports stars stand to reap enormous rewards and earn huge amounts of money from their athletic success, and they are often willing to take extraordinary measures to gain advantage. Some of these measures are dangerous, but compromising the health of athletes is the essence of some sports. Football, boxing, and free climbing are but a few examples. Athletes can always opt out; but competitive sports, like evolution, create arms-race environments, where each embrace of a particular advantage sets a new bar for other competitors to follow.

  Given the massive financial and other rewards that come from being a top professional athlete, we can almost understand how people with these aspirations are willing to risk even their future well-being in pursuit of their dreams. But it’s not just aspiring professional athletes willing to embrace new technologies that create these kinds of potential risks. Even average parents are doing the same to help their children realize their athletic hopes.

  In the sports-obsessed United States, parents place their children in competitive sports programs when they are as young as four. Some twelve-year-olds have insanely competitive schedules almost equivalent to professional athletes. To serve this market of zealous parents, a large industry of direct-to-consumer genetic tests for athletic performance has emerged in recent years. Companies like Atlas Biomed, DNAFit, Genotek, Gonidio, and WeGene offer parents and others information on whether a tested person’s genetic tests indicate single gene mutations believed to confer one athletic benefit or another. Although these predictions are today generally not that informative,9 they will become far more operative as our understanding of the genome grows, creating new possibilities for parents.

  As m
ore genes associated with athletic performance are identified, parents will have the option to consider genetic predictors of athletic potential in one or another area when selecting which of their embryos to implant during IVF. Under current U.S. law, nothing would prevent clinics from offering, or parents from making, this type of determination.

  Let’s say parents selected an embryo to implant based on a predicted likelihood of the future child being a competitive sprinter or producing more than average hemoglobin, or simply tested a newborn for these genetic indications using a product from a direct-to-consumer providers. Would U.S. athletic associations and elite athletic training programs at least want to consider this information as one data point when deciding which young athletes to support, especially if competitor countries like China were already doing so? Jiaxue Gene, a private Chinese company based in Beijing reported on its website that it was already working with the Chinese government to screen children for sports-related genes. “The national sports teams and coaches have contacted Jiaxue Gene,” the site noted, “to screen for students with the highest training potential through the company’s genetic decoding technology.”

  In 2014, Uzbekistan became the first nation to announce it was integrating genetic testing into its national sports program. In conjunction with its national Olympic Committee and several sports federations, Uzbekistan’s Academy of Sciences said it would test children for fifty genes believed to impact athletic potential to help identify possible future stars.10 In August 2018, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology announced that Chinese athletes aspiring to compete in the 2022 Winter Olympics would be required to have their genomes sequence and profiled for “speed, endurance, and explosive force” as one factor in an official selection process guided by “genetic markers.” This type of testing today has a low probability of success because we still know relatively little about what genes do and because athletic success is such a complex mix of biological and environmental factors.

  But given that the difference between a national hero world-champion sprinter and an also-ran is just a few fractions of a second, other countries and sports organizations will follow Uzbekistan’s and China’s model if there is even a hint of efficacy.

  As advanced genetic testing becomes adopted by more countries to identify potential future Olympic stars, other countries will have a choice. If the leaders of sports associations believe genetic testing will not be able to drive success, that it won’t matter, or that even if it works this type of testing violates the spirit of sportsmanship, they can choose to not genetically evaluate young athletes. If they believe genetic testing could have a significant impact on national athletic competition, they might ramp up efforts to do just that.

  Once the hurdle of widespread genetic testing of athletes is cleared, the barriers to embryo selection, and ultimately limited genetic manipulation, to enhance athleticism will likely fall in some places for the exact same competitive reasons. People and leaders in the places where this Rubicon is not crossed will then similarly need to figure out how to respond. If they opt out, their national athletes may no longer be competitive in some sports.

  Athletic competition is only one example of this human and technological arms race where advanced genetics will almost certainly be deployed, albeit in a relatively benign context. Who really cares, in the grand scheme of things, if the United States never wins another Olympic medal? But we all care a great deal that our children get good jobs and find career success, our national economies are strong, and our countries are able to defend themselves. The genetics of sports analogy isn’t just about sports. It’s also about life.

  A truly miracle country, South Korea was in ruins following the devastation of the 1950–53 Korean War, with seemingly lesser prospects than the poorest African states. Through smart government policies, incredible hard work, and a relentless national devotion to education, however, the country grew from an annual per capita GDP of $64 in 1953 to $27,000 today, and from $41 million in total GDP to $1.4 trillion today—a phenomenal 31,000-fold increase.

  Korean students today consistently rank among the highest in global comparative student assessments, and the country is among the most educated in the world. Because competition is fierce to ace the national university entrance exam, suneung, to get into the elite universities seen as stepping-stones to success, preparation starts young. In addition to the excellent schooling the government provides, 75 percent of Korean primary school children are enrolled by their parents in one of the hundred thousand or so cram schools around the country.

  Based significantly on this pressure, youth anxiety and suicide rates in South Korea are among the highest in the world. In response, the Korean government in 2006 imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on cram schools because so many children were becoming chronically exhausted from working into the wee hours of morning at these schools. Despite government efforts to reduce the pressure on South Korea’s children, the Korean education arms race continues.11

  The race for competitive advantage in South Korea extends far beyond education. Physical beauty is treasured the world over, but Korea takes this to a whole new level. Even though the dangers of plastic surgery are well documented, South Korea has the highest per-capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. A BBC poll estimated that around half of all South Korean women in their twenties have had some type of plastic surgery. Korean parents often pay for these plastic surgeries as high school graduation gifts to give their children an additional means of getting ahead.12 “When you’re nineteen, all the girls get plastic surgery, so if you don’t do it, after a few years, your friends will all look better, but you will look like your unimproved you,” a Korean college student told the New Yorker magazine.13

  South Korean parents may be at one end of the spectrum in their willingness to even put their children’s health at risk to gain competitive advantages, but they are not alone.

  Getting kids into top middle and high schools in China often requires parents to use family connections, pay expensive school fees, and bribe teachers and school officials. The Washington Post reported in 2013 that “admission to a decent Beijing middle school often requires payments and bribes of upwards of $16,000, according to many parents. Six-figure sums are not unheard of.”14 Once they are in, the workload is enormous, and some children are in school seven days a week. According to a Reuters report, “Stiff competition for future jobs and ambitious parents mean long hours in the company of school books, not friends.”15

  Like the Korean suneung, preparation for the Chinese college entrance exam, gaokao, is brutal and stress inducing. High pressure can induce student stress and depression even among the younger students. A 2010 survey of nine- to twelve-year-olds in eastern China found that over 80 percent worried “a lot” about exams, 67 percent feared punishment by their teachers, and almost 75 percent feared physical punishment from their parents if they did not excel. A third exhibited regularly the telltale symptoms of extreme stress.16

  American parents may not on average be pushing their children as hard as their Korean or Chinese counterparts, but the immense pressure on American high schoolers to do well on their SAT tests to boost their chances for college admission has sparked a multibillion-dollar test prep industry. A series of American books with titles like The Pressured Child and The Over-Scheduled Child argue the most aggressive parents are pushing the boundaries between helping and harming their kids.17

  In the competitive race of life, these parents around the world are not wrong that advantages accrued after birth help children succeed. That’s why they are also willing to go to such lengths to provide them, including by accessing new genetic tools.

  Within the mix of the scores of new direct-to-consumer genetic tests being offered around the world, a small but growing number are being marketed to parents specifically for children. U.S. company BabyGenes offers parents information on about 170 genes with potential health implications. After sending in a mouth swab taken from their children, paren
ts in various countries using these tests are told they can gain insights into their children’s food tolerances, eating habits, sensitivity to second-hand smoke, susceptibility to addiction and hyperactivity, and whether the child is a morning or night person.18

  In China, dubious “health institutes” are now opening across the country claiming to predict the future strengths of children. One growing chain, Martime Gene, offers parents a genetic test allegedly identifying their children’s talents in twenty different activities, including dancing, math, and sports. Some Chinese parents now pay about $1,500 for a genetic test called myBabyGenome that indicates 950 genes associated with disease risks, 200 with drug reactions, and 100 with physical and personality traits.19

  The following images below from the website of the Malaysian company Map My Gene provide a good example of the type of messaging parents are increasingly receiving.

  MAP MY GENE’S 46 TALENTS AND TRAITS SPREAD ACROSS 8 DISTINCT CATEGORIES

  PERSONALITY TRAITS:

  Optimism, Risk taking, Persistence, Shyness, Composure, Split Personality, Hyper-Activeness, Depression, Impulsive, Mould-ability

  EQ:

  Affectionate, Faithfulness, Passion, Propensity for Teenage Romance, Sentimentality, Sociability, Self-Reflection, Self-Control

  IQ:

  Intelligence, Comprehension, Analytical Memory, Creativity, Reading Ability, Imagination

  SPORTS:

  Endurance, Sprint, Technique, Training Sensitivity, Tendency for Sports Injuries, Sport Psychology

  ADDICTION:

  Alcoholism, Smoking, General Addiction

  PHYSICAL FITNESS:

  Height, General Wellness, Obesity