How will Biotech Impact the Future of Sport?
Image credits: Kentoh via Shutterstock
How will biotech affect our everyday lives in the coming years? I recently explored this question with a group of executives in Australia.
Dr. Tiffany Vora leads a talk on digital biology in an event organized by Wavia. In this talk, Tiffany addresses a question on how biotech will impact the future of sport.
One participant had a very specific interest: how will biotech affect the future of sport?
As with health in general, athletic performance arises from a combination of genes, environment, and behavior. Some people seem to “naturally” excel at sport; many of us don’t. But only a small amount of this diversity definitively stems from genetic differences (see The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance and this recent study of a gene variant that potentially affects tendon performance).
For genetic differences that indeed lend an edge in athletics, could technologies like CRISPR be useful? How might sport evolve if CRISPR is increasingly used to impact athletic performance, legally or illegally? Could human performance be pushed beyond that found naturally?
My biological intuition says that there are many ways that gene editing could enhance performance, but I suspect that most of these genetic enhancements will turn out to have as much effect as, say, good nutrition and being able to afford top-tier training.
💡 While a handful of “blockbuster edits” may push human physiology into new realms, I bet we won’t find them in the obvious places, because we still have so much to learn about human biology.
Further into the future, I envision sports having two basic categories: enhanced and unenhanced. Unenhanced competitors would undergo genetic anti-doping monitoring the way that today’s athletes are subjected to chemical anti-doping monitoring (with debatable success; see Icarus). Enhanced competitors, on the other hand, could carve out whole new levels of artistry, collaboration, and even aggression. We likely will update our mental models of “swimming”, “running”, or even “baseball”.
💡 And when humans start competing off Earth—then all bets are off!
Science fiction is littered with games that could become reality; imagine genetic enhancement plus low gravity! With synthetic biology we could move far beyond natural human traits, and algorithms like AlphaFold could help us explore biologies that evolution hasn’t tinkered with (yet) on Earth.
💡 Is this future “good” or “bad”? I think that depends on where you stand.
For me, there’s no sanctity in sport. Today I already see unlevel playing fields (pun intended) thanks to differential nutrition, education, healthcare, training, equipment and—yes—chemicals. Is adding genetic enhancements to that list a logical next step? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
💡 Which brings us back to the big question. What is the purpose of sport?
As with so many other innovation spaces, we have the chance to harness technology, including biotech, to build a future that keeps the human at the center of sport—however we define it. To empower as many people to play … “play” in the truest sense of the word. And to experience the sheer joy of movement, of striving for excellence, of teamwork.
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