Is Genetic Engineering For Athletes - 2443 Words

Google defines â€Å"a performance-enhancing drug† as any substance taken by athletes to improve performance. Some athletes take steroids to increase their athletic ability in order to have an advantage over their opponents. Athletes have always looked for the one thing that will get them to be bigger, stronger, and better enough to beat out all the other teams. As technology expands, new ways of making the better athlete have been discovered. Currently, you can do a process called gene doping to gain new genes to increase your athletic potential. This new technique has created ethical problems in today’s sports world. The sports community has questioned what the future of sports is going to look like if genetic modification for athletes†¦show more content†¦Gene combinations can be made naturally by sexual reproduction, but reproductive mechanisms limit the number of combinations that can be made. Genetic engineers can make any combination they want if there i s a gene for that trait. This unprecedented ability to mess around with genes allows endless possibles that genetic engineers can put together (Wells, D). Who knows what could become of our world when we allow ourselves to play God. This specific part of science is changing the world we know and creating more problems dealing with ethics. Controlling and changing someone’s genes do have risks and dangers. It is a set of technologies for literally changing the traits of an organism by inserting genetic material from something else. As presented in the novel, Frankenstein, the consequences of genetic engineering could be explained by, â€Å"I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge.† (121). Although genetic engineering can seem like innovative and better technology, it has its’ large share of downsides. If you interfere with genes, for example a gene that increases athletic performance, you could be facing a lot of substantial health risks. High levels of growth hormones have been associated with the development of different types of cancer, heart failure, and strokes (Wells, D). Currently, gene doping is not a reality, but rather a threat. It is