Gene Doping Athletes

How "Gene Doping" Could Create Enhanced Olympians

Although athletes at the Beijing Olympics have been subjected to some of the most aggressive testing ever for performance-enhancing drugs, no case of so-called gene doping has yet been detected. But experts say Oympic athletes may soon be able to genetically enhance their muscles to be faster, stronger, and better able to recover after workouts—if they aren't already.Gene doping uses techniques similar to gene therapies developed to treat muscle-wasting diseases, such as muscular dystrophy. Injected into an athlete, a harmless virus could carry a performance-enhancing gene and splice it into a muscle cell, said Theodore Friedmann, a gene therapy researcher at the University of California, San Diego