Gene doping has a precise definition with the World Anti-Doping Code as ‘the non-therapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or of the modulation of gene expression, having the capacity to improve athletic performance’. However, the Code does not take into account the possibility of germ-line genetic engineering and how, subsequently, sports would deal with the possibility that people might be born with already genetically enhanced predispositions. Over the years, some athletes have been born with abnormal genetic conditions that have benefited them in competition. There is currently no way of dealing witch such cases, unless it is concluded that the abnormality makes an athlete unfit for competition.
Published in Chapter:
The Ethics of Human Enhancement in Sport
Andy Miah (University of the West of Scotland, Scotland)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-022-6.ch005
Abstract
This chapter outlines a technoethics for sport by addressing the relationship between sport ethics and bioethics. The purpose of this chapter is to establish the conditions in which a technoethics of sport should be approached, taking into account the varieties and forms of technology in sport. It also provides an historical overview to ethics and policy making on sport technologies and contextualises the development of this work within the broader medical ethical sphere. It undertakes a conceptualisation of sport technology by drawing from the World Anti-Doping Code, which specifies three conditions that determine whether any given technology is considered to be a form of doping. In so doing, it scrutinizes the ‘spirit of sport’, the central mechanism within sport policy that articulates a technoethics of sport. The chapter discusses a range of sport technology examples, focusing on recent cases of hypoxic training and gene doping.