Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

The Swimsuit Arms Race

It looks like those high-tech swimsuits that have been breaking world records for the last couple of years might finally be banned.

Is that a good thing?

FINA, the world's swimming competition authority, has just begun to issue rulings on which suits can or can't be worn in races. The criteria are thickness, buoyancy, and permeability. Let's consider the arguments for regulation, as put forth this week in Agence France Presse and the New York Times.

Reason No. 1: They tilt the playing field. This is the standard metaphor for fairness in sports. Swimsuit regulation should put all athletes "on a level playing field," says one top racer.

This argument makes sense only because the new suits are expensive, costing hundreds of dollars. If the prices came down to where everyone could afford them, I don't see a problem. Nobody bans composite tennis racquets just because they're better than aluminum.

Reason No. 2: They cancel out talent gaps. The suits are "enabling athletes of lesser ability to compete on equal terms with the best-conditioned, hardest-working athletes in the sport. That is why the mandate for change was clear," a FINA executive tells the Times. A top swimmer complains: "A lot of old records that were really, really good are being taken down by people you never heard of."

This argument sounds confused. Why is it wrong to let swimmers of "lesser ability" compete "on equal terms"? Isn't that a way of leveling the playing field? Are the traditional top swimmers the "hardest-working" ones? Or are they just genetically lucky? And aren't the swimmers "you never heard of" the ones least likely to have the money for fancy suits? What's so righteous about freezing them out?

Reason No. 3: They change the sport. They "make a muscled and stocky body as streamlined as a long and lean one," the Times observes. "With the body riding high on the water like a racing hull, it changes a swimmer's relationship with the water, influencing everything from how vigorously the swimmer has to kick to the rhythm of the stroke."

So what? Metal and composite racquets did the same thing to tennis. Pads have changed who can play football. Equipment alters the body requirements for sports all the time. Often, in retrospect, we like the change, in part because it opens the game to a wider range of people.

Reason No. 4: They're consuming the sport. "In 2008, an unprecedented 108 world records were set, the majority by athletes wearing the [LZR] suit made by Speedo," the Times notes. This year, "18 world records have been broken by swimmers wearing suits with fewer panels and seams and more polyurethane" than the LZR. Last year, Speedo was the big story, but by the latest count, "22 manufacturers ... have entered the swimsuit race."

To me, this is the most powerful argument for cracking down. It's no longer a question of helping everyone buy the 2008 LZR, as I naively proposed last year. As the Associated Press notes, that suit has already "been outstripped by polyurethane models." The decisive race today isn't between the swimmers; it's between those 22 manufacturers. When the engineers are overshadowing the swimmers, the sport isn't just changing. It's disappearing.

"It's the athlete that is making the difference. The suit is not breaking the records," one swimmer tells AFP. But that's not true. The new suits are turning the same athletes from losers into winners:

[Rafael] Muñoz, a 21-year-old Spaniard, did not advance past the preliminary heats in the 100 butterfly at the Olympics in August, but this year ... [h]e has lowered his time from Beijing more than two seconds, to 50.46, which is two-hundredths faster than what Michael Phelps swam in winning the gold. Then there is the 24-year-old Brazilian Henrique Barbosa, who finished seventh in his preliminary heat in the Olympics in the 100-meter breaststroke in 1:01.11. Nine months later, with his hulking 6-foot-4 frame wedged into one of the new suits, he posted the fastest time in the world this year, a 59.03.

This is a controlled experiment: The same athletes, with less than a year to improve their conditioning, are cutting their times precipitously, thanks to innovations in suit technology.

If you want to pick a good suit and put everybody in it, fine. But we can't have an ongoing arms race among manufacturers that determines all the records and who sets them.

Following Suit

Maybe you can ban steroids in sports because they're medically dangerous. And maybe you can ban carbon-fiber prosthetic legs because they're newfangled. But what about swimsuits? What do you do when a technology that's been around for ages—sleeker, tighter suits—becomes decisive? What can you say when the only objection to such technology is that most people can't afford it?

That's the situation today in collegiate and high-school swimming, according to Amy Shipley's enlightening report in Sunday's Washington Post. Swimmers wearing Speedo's LZR suits set 71 of the 77 new aquatic racing world records at, or just before, this year's Olympics. Now collegiate swimming programs are buying LZRs, and their competitors feel obliged to, um, follow suit. The trend extends to the high-school level, where the suits are showing up at state championship meets. Problem: LZRs cost around $500 retail. At best, with discounts, they go for about half that. And because of the fancy fabric, they wear out after just a few meets. Bottom line: Swimmers who can afford these suits will beat equally talented swimmers who can't.

Athletic federations are divided over what to do. Two months ago, USA Swimming prohibited kids under 13 from competing in the suits. The NCAA imposed a moratorium on the suits but then withdrew it.

In general, I don't like sports equipment bans based on sheer cost. Composite tennis racquets were pricey when they first came out. Should they have been prohibited? What about golf clubs or bike frames? Innovative materials are usually expensive at the outset. The way they become cheaper is by gaining notice, spreading to a broader market, and being produced more efficiently in subsequent iterations. If you ban them, you block this process.

In the swimsuit case, it looks to me as though a logical compromise is already unfolding. What makes the suit prohibitively expensive isn't just the outlay, but the fact that it wears out so fast. The crucial number is the per-meet cost. And that number can be sharply reduced by using the suits only at championship events late in the season. This is exactly what some college programs are already doing. You don't need a Ferrari to pick up your groceries. Swim your regular meets in cheaper suits, and save your LZRs for the big events.

This policy coincides with Speedo's discount strategy. The company says it offers LZR discounts to sponsoring colleges. At conference championships, the discount is 40 percent. At the NCAA championships, it's 65 percent. The higher you go in competition, the more the suit matters, and the more worthwhile it is for the company to put you in its suit.

Don't ban the LZR. The unfairness at issue is cost, and cost is adjustable. Let's see how the players adjust before the supervisors go in with a heavy hand.

Olympic Inflation

Can we please stop fussing over every new Olympic record?

A new record means that an athlete using today's equipment outperformed an athlete using yesterday's equipment. It's not a fair fight.

In swimming alone, today's advantages include:

1. LZR Racer suit. It reduces friction (compared with skin) and is structurally designed to compress and streamline the body for maximum speed. Estimated drag reduction: 5 percent to 10 percent. Estimated average improvement in top swimmers' best times: 2 percent. Designed by NASA scientists and computers, among others. Cost: $500.

2. Pool depth. This is the deepest pool ever used in the Olympics. Depth disperses turbulence, reducing resistance.

3. Pool width and gutters. Two extra lanes at the margins disperse waves to gutters, reducing ricochet and resistance.

4. Lane dividers. The plastic ones in Beijing deflect turbulence down instead of sideways, reducing resistance.

5. Starting blocks. Nonskid versions have replaced the old wooden ones, boosting dive propulsion.

6. Video. Recordings and analysis identify target variables such as stroke distance and turns.

7. Medical tests. Swimmers are blood-tested after each race to measure lactic-acid buildup.

8. Sports scientists. They run the monitoring and analysis. The U.S. swim team has four.

And here's a partial list of advances in other sports:

1. Lighter shoes. The latest material is carbon nanotubes.

2. Asymmetric shoes. Stronger carbon base in the right shoe tilts you to the left to increase speed as you round the track. Left shoe is designed to stabilize you.

3. Ice vest. It lowers your temperature before the race so you can delay overheating for better performance.

4. Hypoxic tents. Sleeping in low-oxygen chambers increases red blood-cell levels.

5. Aluminum javelins. They reduce vibration compared with the old carbon ones.

6. Bicycle wheels. Front wheels with fewer spokes (eight instead of 32) reduce weight and air resistance. So do composite one-piece rear wheels. All frames are carbon.

Michael Phelps' coach says the LZR suit is fair. "Everybody is in the suit so it's across the board," he argues. That may be true of today's top swimmers. But it's not true of yesterday's. So comparing today's performances to the performances of 20, eight, or even four years ago—which is what "new Olympic record" means—is generally unfair.

If you want to compare today's athletes to yesterday's, the ideal method would be an inflationary formula. We already calculate how much $1 in 1980 would be worth today, based on price increases. We ought to be able to devise a similar multiplier for each Olympic event, based on average year-to-year improvement among top athletes. Averaging would wash out idiosyncratic ups and downs. The effects of aging could be measured and factored out.

Olympic inflation indexing wouldn't devalue new records. It would isolate and elevate records that truly stand out. Scores of media reports have boasted that every team in this year's 4 x 100 men's swimming relay beat the time that won that event four years ago. But by inflationary standards, the British, who beat the 2004 winning time by three-tenths of a second in constant time, actually failed to keep pace with it. The Americans, who beat it by five seconds, produced a genuine achievement.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch the latest high-definition broadcast from Beijing on my 46-inch flat-screen TV. It beats the crap out of the 20-inch tube I was squinting at in 2004. But that doesn't make my eyesight any better.

White-Collar Steroids

Are people in your office using performance-enhancing drugs?

I'm not talking about steroids. I'm talking about brain enhancers, such as Ritalin for concentration and Provigil for sleep reduction. Two months ago, I wrote about a Nature survey in which 20 percent of a self-selected sample of scientists, academics, and journalists admitted using such drugs "for non-medical reasons to improve my concentration, focus and memory." In absolute terms, it's hard to argue against these neuroenhancers. But in relative terms, freedom of enhancement can become coercive. If your officemates are outworking you by popping pills, can you afford not to join them?

We know this is a problem in sports. Has it become a problem in the white-collar workplace? Neil Munro examines this question in a recent issue of National Journal. The answer seems to be: We don't yet know, but signs point to trouble ahead.

Munro goes through what little we know. First, there's the non-random Nature poll. Then there's a survey at one college in which one of every six students admitted to taking prescription drugs as a study aid. Munro also cites the recent doubling of adult prescriptions for Adderall and Ritalin, implying that the increase is too big and fast to be purely therapeutic. But the really interesting comment comes from Zack Lynch, the executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization:

If you're GE Capital and you have offices in 154 financial centers around the planet, and these [brain-drug] tools are available in Dubai, and your workers there are trading more effectively, 5 to 10 percent better—they'll have a neuro-competitive advantage over workers where these tools are not legalized.

Neuro-competitive advantage. There's the leverage point for pushing brain boosters into the workplace. The good news is, these pills might make you more productive. The bad news is, if you don't take them, some guy in Dubai will, and he'll eat your job. Lynch flatly tells Munro that if the United States restricts performance-enhancing office drugs, "companies will shift their work offshore."

I don't want to make this scenario sound like it'll be here tomorrow. The brain is notoriously finicky, so there are a lot of obstacles and side effects to work out. But the same is true of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and that hasn't stopped them from becoming a coercive presence.

Munro points out that neuroenhancement is a big emerging market and that one firm has already been caught exploiting it:

Cephalon, a large biopharmaceutical company, agreed to pay a $425 million settlement to the federal government last year after the firm's sales force was accused of marketing its Provigil anti-sleep drug for purposes other than those for which it has been approved. Provigil was approved for treating narcolepsy, but it was used as a stimulant by some of the scientists who responded to the Nature poll.

Next time you're chatting with your colleagues around the water cooler, ask what they're taking with their water.

Little Green Men

The genetically engineered humans are here! The genetically engineered humans are here!

I didn't believe it when I heard the report was in the Sunday Times of London. This, after all, is the paper that butchered the gay sheep story and can't find any evidence to back up its disputed paraphrases of James Watson. But the original report, which the Sunday Times neglects to mention, turns out to have been published in a scientific journal, Fertility and Sterility. It's titled, "Genetic modification of preimplantation embryos and embryonic stem cells (ESC) by recombinant lentiviral vectors: efficient and stable method for creating transgenic embryos and ESC."

For those of you who don't have access to the pricey journal, the New York Times boils down the experiment: Scientists "put a gene for a fluorescent protein into the single-celled human embryo," and "after the embryo divided for three days, all the cells in the embryo glowed."

What's new in this experiment isn't genetic modification of humans. We've already done that in limited doses, through the same viral technique. What's new is that because this was a single-celled embryo, every cell it went on to produce, including egg and sperm cells, would (except for the diploid-haploid transition, which gets complicated) carry the same genetic tweak. If the embryo were implanted and grew into an adult, its fluorescent gene would be passed down like any other. This is called germline modification. If you wanted to transform our species or give your offspring an advantage that persists through generations, this is how you'd do it.

Naturally, genetic watchdog groups are freaked out. Human Genetics Alert calls it a prelude to "eugenics" and "designer babies" and demands an "international moratorium on such experiments." The Center for Genetics and Society says it "could push us toward a GATTACA-like world" dominated by "the genetically enhanced."

The scientists, based at Cornell University, offer several responses. First, they used no U.S. federal funds, so no legal restrictions were violated. Second, the gene conveyed no enhancements; it was just a green "marker" to help them see whether it was replicated in subsequent cell divisions. Third, the experiment "was done on an embryo that was never going to be viable," due to pre-existing chromosomal defects. Fourth, they destroyed the embryo after five days, as required by a Cornell review committee.

The watchdog groups are alarmed because Britain's parliament is presently debating legislation to lift restrictions on human embryonic genetic modification. (See yesterday's post about the bill's pregnant-man loophole.) But proponents of the legislation point out that the law would still ban growing such embryos beyond 14 days or transferring them to a womb.

When you line up the points made by scientists and liberalizers, it's easier to understand what's really going on here. It's not that we're plowing unimpeded toward genetic engineering of children. To the contrary, we've drawn lines to prevent that: the 14-day limit and the no-implantation rule. What's going on is that by drawing these lines, we've created a zone where virtually no legal or moral rules apply. Look at the American and British treatment of cloning, and you'll see the same pattern. You can clone embryos, mix species, and engineer all you want, as long as you don't implant the embryos or grow them beyond 14 days.

Maybe this system will allow us to make important scientific discoveries and conquer diseases without crossing the lines we've drawn. On the other hand, maybe it'll turn embryos into a testing ground for techniques that we'll use for people-engineering when we're ready to go there. Or maybe we'll relax the rules a bit at a time, extending our techniques to more advanced embryos as we test and refine them. We'll tell ourselves that we're curing genetic diseases in the womb so that babies and their babies will be born healthy.

The argument for the latter scenario is that, far from being diabolical, the idea of loosening the 14-day rule makes a lot of sense. The Cornell scientists point out that genetically modified embryos "could be used to study how diseases develop" and that "in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally need to grow the embryo and carry out further tests." The longer you grow the embryo, the more you learn.

How long could we grow genetically modified embryos if we lift the 14-day rule? According to the New York Times, "A spokesman for the National Institutes of Health said the Cornell work would not be classified as gene therapy in need of federal review, because a test-tube embryo is not considered a person under the regulations." Roughly speaking, U.S. law confers personhood at viability. That's five months or so. Plenty of time for good work to be done.

I don't mean to make this scenario sound imminent. But as we ease ourselves into the world of genetic engineering, let's notice what we're doing. We're chalking off a zone where the ethics of human manipulation don't apply, on the grounds that the human entities we're manipulating aren't human beings. Seven years ago, scientists and supportive ethicists set up a similar ethics-free zone based on origin: Human embryos produced by fertilization were protected, while those produced by cloning were fair game. Now we've shifted to lines based on age and location.

Will these lines hold? You can't dismiss the fear that they won't as slippery-slope nonsense from the anti-abortion crowd. Embryo research is fundamentally different from abortion. If you're a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, you have no incentive to prolong it. But if you're a scientist with an embryo modified for research, you have lots of good reasons to keep growing it and studying it. The only things holding you back are your conscience, your review board, and the law.

Here's my prediction: We won't end up extending species-mixing beyond the 14-day line. Nor will we end up deliberately growing embryos past that point for harvestable tissue, as I previously speculated. But we will extend germline genetic engineering all the way through pregnancy and beyond, and our grandchildren will wonder why it was ever controversial.

Grow Your Own Pacemaker

By inserting genes into rat heart cells growing in a dish, they were able to create a beating pattern that was faster and more regular than had been seen before. ... [Their first step was] to load up a common cold virus with a pacemaker gene, and then used the virus to successfully infect heart cells in a dish. The infected cells ended up with the gene and began making a pacing current they had lacked. Next the scientists tried the technique in dogs with slow hearts. The gene transfer worked. Parts of the dogs' hearts that had been beating 25 to 40 times per minute were restored to a normal 60 beats per minute. ... [Later] they stitched pacemaker genes into adult stem cells, using a technique that doesn't require viruses, and then injected the altered cells into the heart. ... [W]hen the researchers tested the pacemaker stem cells in dogs for six weeks, the cells behaved just as they hoped. As a precaution, the researchers showed that they could turn off a cellular pacemaker if it becomes hyperactive with a drug ...

This is a great illustration of the point I was trying to make two weeks ago about the superiority of flesh-based technology. First we had flesh but no pacemakers. If your heart lost it rhythm, you had no backup. Now we have electronic pacemakers. They solve the problem of unreliable flesh, but they introduce the problems of electronics. Inserting them requires surgery. Their batteries are finite, and, as we learned from the Medtronic fiasco, their wires can fail. Worse, like other electronic devices, they can be hacked -- in this case, with potentially lethal results.

The long-term solution is flesh. Unlike electronics, flesh can be grown inside your body, avoiding the need for surgery. It's self-correcting, self-repairing, and self-renewing in a way that electronics aren't. And there isn't an easy way to hack somebody else's genes -- at least, not yet. For the same reason, we do need a way to remotely reset your biological pacemaker if it runs out of control. That's where the aforementioned drug comes in. But if you're in the pacemaker market, you had that problem already.

Oransky ends with a wonderful quote from Cohen: "Just like Lasik is a better solution than eyeglasses, a biological pacemaker would be a better solution than an electronic one." Having written about Lasik before, I like the analogy. At the time, I saw Lasik as a potential enhancement of human powers, with athletes boosting their vision beyond 20/20. But as Cohen points out, you can also look at it the other way: Instead of outfitting you with gizmos we've come to think of as normal -- glasses or contacts -- we just fix your flesh. Sometimes the most effective technology is also the most natural.

Doping With Tylenol

In yesterday's piece on nerd doping, I mentioned that I'm a skeptic of anti-doping policies for at least three reasons. One, many of the complaints tend to be based on harm (e.g. from steroids), but that harm can be mitigated or avoided through improved techniques. Two, the lines we draw tend to be pretty arbitrary. Three, once we've trampled the old rules (e.g., the employment of private coaches), we often wonder why we ever enforced them.

This morning's batch of news underscores the first point. A summary of a study presented at a biology conference reports:

Taking daily recommended dosages of ibuprofen and acetaminophen caused a substantially greater increase over placebo in the amount of quadriceps muscle mass and muscle strength gained during three months of regular weight lifting. ... [T]he chronic consumption of ibuprofen or acetaminophen during resistance training appears to have induced intramuscular changes that enhance the metabolic response to resistance exercise, allowing the body to add substantially more new protein to muscle.

Ibuprofen or acetaminophen are the key ingredients in Advil and Tylenol, respectively. You probably have these performance-enhancing drugs in your medicine cabinet.

Don't start popping Tylenol and expecting huge quadriceps just yet. The participants in the study were all 60 or older, with an average age of 65. It's possible that the muscle-boosting effects apply only to people who have lost muscle mass and strength, not to athletes or other healthy young folks who just want to add to their normal allotment. But the fact that it works in old folks reinforces another problem with regulation of performance-enhancing substances: If a substance is OK because it helps a 60-year-old recover the strength of a 25-year-old, why shouldn't a 25-year-old be allowed to try the same substance in pursuit of additional strength? Surely today's 25-year-old athletes are stronger than the 25-year-old athletes of previous, less nutritionally and medically savvy generations. That's why records keep falling. Why exactly should we draw a line at the norms of the 20^th -- whoops, 21^st -- Century?

I'm sure you've got your answers. Let's hear them.