What draws the line between play and competition

When it comes to competition, winning is, by definition, the point. The shift from friendly games to playing to win has motivated innovations in training, equipment and even genetic interventions. George Church is a pioneer in synthetic biology and genomics, the study of a human’s complete set of DNA. He helped start the Human Genome Project and played a key role in launching CRISPR gene-editing technology. He also has launched some 50 biotech startups, including one aimed at boosting athletic performance. 

Kate MacArthur: How would you describe sports genomics to somebody like my grandmother?

George Church: Just as you can enhance your performance with shoes and golf clubs and racing cars, you can enhance your performance with the food that you eat, the drugs that you take to maintain normal performance, and the drugs you might take that would enhance your performance. Some of those drugs level the playing field, because there are people who are born with performance-enhancing abilities just because of the genetic lottery. We're increasingly getting to the point where if we want to make an even playing field, we can.

MacArthur: How do sports genomics fit into the myriad projects that you are involved in?

Church: Jonathan Scheiman, who started FitBiomics as a postdoc[toral researcher] in my lab looked at athletes at various points in their training to see what microorganisms they had to see if any were overrepresented in the athletes. He found some, like Veillonella, that turned lactic acid, which is mildly toxic and that comes after long exertion, into propionic acid, which is mildly enhancing. So that becomes a potentially performance-enhancing probiotic.

MacArthur: Where does nutritional performance enhancement fit as a priority for the future?

Church: The future keeps changing. The original marathon was run barefoot. And it wasn’t long before people were wearing sandals, which at first seemed like there was not an advantage. But then it became clear it was an advantage. And we developed better javelins and discus, and it basically was a showplace for your technology. Same thing goes for nutrition. For a while you could call it cheating, like when you train at a high altitude so that gives you higher red blood cell counts. To a certain extent, what is cheating and what is in the rules keeps changing, and it’s completely up to us.

MacArthur: Are you talking about blood doping?

Church: As an alternative to going to high altitude or being born genetically with a high red blood cell count, you can use things like erythropoietin, which is a natural compound that's absolutely molecularly identical to what's in the body of someone who genetically has high levels of red blood cells. And it's hard to detect because it's natural. Are you considered doping because you were born with it or because you took it? It's hard to enforce, and if you get decades of experience that it's safe and it's fairer to have a simple erythropoietin injection than to go to high altitude or hypobaric chambers or those sort of things that are considered more natural, eventually the rules change.

MacArthur: If everyone can modify tech or methods to boost their performance, where's the fun in that?

Church: There still is the skill that you need to put one foot in front of the other without falling over.

MacArthur: Do you think we’ll see gene editing for performance in the future?

Church: There is almost no difference between training in a high altitude, taking erythropoietin as a protein and taking erythropoietin as a gene, because the gene makes the protein, the high altitude makes the protein, they all end up where you make more red blood cells. But as long as you're regulating it the same way that the FDA regulates drugs in general, and physician ethics has guidelines, it's more to regulate it for safety rather than to regulate it for some arbitrary rule. I think that's where we're headed.

MacArthur: What would you like to see happen in the future of athletic performance enhancement?

Church: It's what will happen, not so much what I want to happen. It is likely that our biotechnologies are getting better exponentially. As we get more comfortable with things like gene therapy, it will spread. A perfect example of how comfortable you are with gene therapy is we barely even accept the notion that the top five vaccines for COVID-19 were gene therapy formulations. That is going to be seen as a big shift towards gene therapy. And by the way, it brought the perceived price down, so that the price of gene therapies were in the range of $2.5 million dollars a dose for rare diseases. But for common use like pandemics or aging reversal or possibly sports, where billions of people can use it, now it's $2 a dose. So that's getting to be more affordable than going and training for three months in the Himalayas.