The use of medication to adjust our moods, suspend our menstrual cycles, improve our concentration and take the edge off our panic is growing not just common, but also ever more socially acceptable. So are we really that far from a future point when doping to improve physical prowess will be considered just another part of an athlete's winning arsenal? Sanctioning such pharmaceutical skill enhancement -- long a staple of the typical cyberpunk novel and an assumed part of the e transhumanist vision of the future -- is apparently gaining adherents in the world of sports journalism. According to a sports columnist for a major American daily paper, quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review, this view has become "shockingly fashionable" among sports writers. The CJR notes that a recent editorial in the journal Nature predicts that "[b]y the end of this century the unenhanced body or mind may well be vanishingly rare." Cheating's not kosher, of course, but changing the rules? Worth discussing, according to Nature.
It's not really that far-fetched an idea. Beta blockers are often used by people with irregular heartbeats to even things out; now musicians take beta blockers, legallly, to dull their anxieties before auditions and cope with stage fright. The anti-depressant Wellbutrin is also prescribed to help people lose weight or quit smoking (both potentially relevant to getting and keeping particular jobs).
Perhaps, despite the furor and fury that illegal doping generates, we're actually moving towards the transhuman moment, when people begin to use the discoveries of contemporary science and technology to surpass their human limitations while still being recognizably human. (Although when you look at the extremely hypertrophic muscle development of some athletes, that last can be debatable.) And as long as this kind of assist to human potential remains illegal, it effectively creates a sort of class system, mostly accessible to those atheletes privileged by wealth, status, or both to take advantage of what doping does for their prowess, as well as much more likely to be misused with potentially fatal results.
How do we redefine the inherent value of sport in measuring human physical accomplishment -- an important cultural standard for as long as humans have recorded history, and probably longer -- when it's no longer simply a question of athlete versus his or her own physiology, but instead one of how well the athlete tweaks his or her mix of dope?
Well, maybe it's not that heavy. The CJR article reminded me of a favorite exchange from the scifi cartoon Futurama, between characters watching a "blernsball" game:
Leela: "Miller's on a pace to hit 70 blerns."Professor: "He's good, all right, but he's no Clem Johnson. And Johnson played back in the days before steroid injections were mandatory!"
