Paris, Aug 27: Sydney may be the last Olympic Gameswith a serious claim to be a competition between athletes whose muscles came from honest sweat rather than a scientist's syringe.But scientists say that worse lies in store: a radical andelusive form of laboratory cheating that, unchecked, could destroy the Olympic ideal itself.The foe is biotechnology, whose genetically-modified toolswill be many Times more powerful than the crude steroids, amphetamines, painkillers and other trickery of the past.And unless anti-doping methods make a quantum leapforward, biotech fraud will be impossible to detect."We are not talking science fiction," says Gerard Dine,president of France's Biotechnology Institute. "The phenomenon is already here. Sydney will be the first Olympic Games to have to face up to the biotechnology headache."The major problems in Australia will be two substancesthat emerged from the labs in the 1980s. They were designed only for medical use but have since been acquired by unscrupulous athletes and trainers.The biggest headache is erythropoietin (EPO), a hormonewhich helps create red blood cells in the bone marrow. These cells carry oxygen around the body, providing fuel for the muscles - the more cells, the more stamina.EPO is a hormone that occurs naturally. But, in 1989, itemerged from the labs in synthetic form as a treatment for severe anaemia. Nine years later, EPO hit the headlines in the 1998 TourFrance, a competition tarnished by the discovery of a huge cache of the performance-enhancing drug.The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has vowed tocarry out hundreds of EPO tests in Sydney in a determined bid to crack down on the outlawed substance."The detectives are catching up and, with the introductionof a new test for EPO, they are on the verge of closing one of the large loopholes," Don Catlin, a biochemist at the Olympic drug testing lab at California University in Los Angeles, saidThe problem, though, is that EPO disappears quickly fromthe body, and thus can be administered shortly before a race. "If you want to be really sure that EPO has not been illicitly used, you have to carry out frequent snap checks on the same athlete," says Dine.Alongside EPO is the human growth hormone, designed tohelp stunted children grow.It also came to the world's attention in 1998, in the run-up to the Perth world swimming championships when 13 vials of the hormone were found in the luggage of Chinese swimmer Yuan Yuan.Yet EPO and growth hormone are merely the vanguard in aspectacular revolution.Once biotechnology, a young science just 20 years old,gets into its stride, athletes of the near future may bear a closer resemblance to Robocop than homo sapiens.One likely goal will be genetic manipulation of athletesthemselves. A harmless virus carrying modified genetic material would act as a taxi, penetrating each cell and taking out an underperforming gene and slotting in a perfect one. This has already been documented in two US experimentsth mice and baboons, which were given EPO genes that nearly doubled their red blood-cell count.In another experiment conducted by British scientists,mice were injected with a gene controlling a protein called IGF-1, which beefs up muscle fibre in response to exercise. Within two weeks of the injection, the mice's muscles had grown by 20 percent."If we start adding in growth factors it could be as highas 50 percent," Lee Sweeney, a University of Pennsylvania physiologist who took part in the experiment, told the British weekly New Scientist."This could give you the ability to grow new muscle ondemand. Because its effects are local, you could just inject the IGF-1 gene directly into the muscle you want to enlarge. You could potentially re-engineer your body." Muscles need a big skeletal structure to hang on. Thisuld be achieved by building bones, cartilage and tendons from stem cells, the immature cells that can taken from blood serum and reprogrammed, using the athlete's genetic material, to grow into the desired tissues that would fit in just as if it were a natural part of his body.The idea remains in the future, although earlyexperimental work is underway.Spotting genetic manipulation would be harder thandetecting a needle in a haystack: only a molecular laboratory could do this, with equipment able to find traces of the virus which delivered the gene.Dine pessimistically says that the fox of biotechnology isso far ahead of the hounds that sooner or later sporting chiefs will have to bow to the inevitable."In these conditions, it is bogus to think that you canroot out cheating and host competitions in line with the traditional Olympic ideals," he said."We may eventually see competitions in which theathletes' bodies have been allowed to be modified, but under safe medical supervision."
