The long horizon is looking at gene therapy, which is
introducing synthetically made genes in the lab or or editing genes with this new technology called CRISPR
Where you can actually like snip and edit DNA
and
The fact that is usually on acknowledges that we have absolutely no idea. What most genes do
so editing them would not be that useful and most
Traits like right people thought when we sequence the genome
There'd be like one gene that tells you how tall you are and turns out you know
there's there's
Millions of spots potentially, you know on the genome that affect your physical development in that way and so editing it would be totally impractical
But there are some cases where we know of single gene mutations that causes somebody to say over
produce their own EPO hormone in their body or
to
Get rid of a protein called
Myostatin it tells your muscles to stop growing
Therefore their muscles grow like crazy and in those cases where you can identify a single mutation that causes this incredible difference
Given the history of some athletes being willing to try anything. You've got to assume that some will try that
Even if it's a great risk to their health this gene therapy, it's here
It's being it's primarily being worked on for rare diseases. And one of the reasons that is is because many rare diseases
Are caused by a single gene mutation, whereas more common diet diseases diabetes again. We have no idea. We know it's caused by
The environment like the way people live but the genetic basis don't really know so
We'll see this in these rare diseases and it's just a small leap
I mean some of those diseases like this overproduction of your own body's EPO
would also have like a great athletic effect there wasn't I mean there was a guy I wrote about who
won seven Olympic medals in the 60s a cross-country
Skier who many many years later turned out he had this mutation that ran in his family where they over produced red blood cells
And just so he was like naturally what Lance Armstrong was with technology basically and so it's a disease
Might be a disease that some people wouldn't mind editing and that was a single gene caused condition
