MEET BABY HERCULES!!

OK, not quite. But it's like some bad sci-fi comic. A German boy was recently found to have a genetic defect that prevents his muscle mass from going and going and going:

Somewhere in Germany is a baby Superman, born in Berlin with bulging arm and leg muscles. Not yet 5, he can hold seven-pound weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do. He has muscles twice the size of other kids his age and half their body fat.

DNA testing showed why: The boy has a genetic mutation that boosts muscle growth...

The boy's mutant DNA segment was found to block production of a protein called myostatin that limits muscle growth. The news comes seven years after researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore created buff "mighty mice" by "turning off" the gene that directs cells to produce myostatin.

"Now we can say that myostatin acts the same way in humans as in animals," said the boy's physician, Dr. Markus Schuelke, a professor in the child neurology department at Charite/University Medical Center Berlin. "We can apply that knowledge to humans, including trial therapies for muscular dystrophy."

The AP article reporting the story goes a little over the top when it says:

...athletes would almost surely want to get their hands on such a drug and use it like steroids to bulk up.

We're nowhere near athletes being able to use these sorts of things effectively. But it's certainly the direction we're heading. In the meantime, you'll have to settle for Steak-orade.

Or, something like that, according to this piece in the Sacramento Bee that would make Al Campanis choke:

To have any chance of getting into the Olympics you have to pick the right parents. All the hard work and discipline and coaching, all the early nights and good nutrition and sacrifice - and you're only halfway there at best.

OK, OK, so genes play a role, a big one. But what I found most interesting in the piece is how much other nations try to steer young people into sports for which they might be best genetically 'suited':

Massimo Testa, an internationally known physician and director of the UC Davis Sports Performance Program, says hard work and desire can take an athlete only so far.... "Everybody can improve. That is the good thing," he said. "The bad news is there is an upper limit."

In his native Italy, athletes are sized up early and steered toward certain sports far more than in the United States, said Testa, largely because this country has a much larger population and, thus, a greater talent pool.

"The American system can produce top athletes, but we don't know how many are wasted," he said.

Kenya, which has dominated the marathon and other long-distance events for years, places so much emphasis on sifting for genetic superstars that it has every Kenyan run a time trial before leaving high school, Shaffrath said. The good ones are encouraged to attend training camps, well aware that international success can bring monetary rewards to their impoverished villages.

Such evaluations are made only at the elite level in the United States, and the testing data are used to refine training programs to make successful athletes reach new heights.

All this makes me wonder what I would have been best at. Let's see, I can't run, I can't jump, I can't swim, I can't do a lot of things. So maybe speed chess?

The World Anti-Doping Agency will meet... to create a battle plan for detecting and deterring perhaps the most nefarious doping method yet developed: genetic alteration of an athlete's body.

Although experts say the prospects of a genetically manipulated athlete participating in the 2004 Athens Olympics is highly improbable, scientists who advise WADA say it is only a matter of a few years before the high-tech procedures — and their incredible promise of massive improvements of athletic performance — enter the world's sports arenas through a growing international black market.

"No one should worry about (genetically altered) athletes today," says Lee Sweeney, professor of physiology and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer in the use of the IGF-1 gene (insulin-like growth factor I) to rebuild diseased muscle tissue. "But if you're WADA, you've got to anticipate so you won't be blindsided when that day comes."

...Add to that grim scenario the prospect that the former Soviet Union's once-powerful scientific apparatus may be the breeding ground for 21st-century illicit gene transformations.

"That's a fair fear, a real fear," says Sweeney, who gets dozens of calls every week from athletes eager to volunteer for IGF-1 human trials after hearing of his success in building huge muscles in lab mice. For safety reasons, those trials are at least five years away, but that knowledge hasn't deterred those eager for transformation now.