Learn a new acronym if you don't already know it: World Anti-Doping Agency or WADA. Sounds like something out of an Austin Powers movie. Well, WADA and the International Olympic Committee are banning genetic therapy to enhance athletic performance:

Lungs designed to saturate oxygen for endurance running; arms custom-built for golf, tennis, baseball-pitching, or javelin-throwing; knees constructed for skiing; sprinters, perhaps, with cells cloned from cheetahs, and rugby-players ditto, but additionally modified with cells from the fighting Miuras of the Spanish bullring? Jonah Lomu would look like Ronnie Corbett.

Science fiction? Sport does not believe so, as evidenced by the decision by the World Anti-Doping Agency and International Olympic Committee to add genetic manipulation to the list of offences under their rules.

There is no end to the number of ways that genetic engineering will enhance athletic performance:

'Designer knees' for downhill skiers or 'super arms' for tennis players have moved from science-fiction novels to the agency agenda as it fears genetic engineering could become the biggest threat to the future of sports. However, the anti-doping authorities are already playing catch-up and genetic doping could prove hard to rein in.

This article predicts genetically engineered athletes within 10 years:

"It's within the grasp of any graduate-level student in molecular biology," said Dr. Ted Friedmann, director of the gene therapy program at the University of California at San Diego and a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency's health and research committee.

"He or she could give you at least four different ways to do it. They could also tell you how to improve oxygen transportation or tell you how to engineer faster and stronger athletes. That, combined with the existence of huge amounts of money in sport and the pressures to excel, all suggests something will be done in this direction.

Gene therapy to enhance athletic performance will be much harder to detect. It could be injected directing into an organ and the effects could be limited to just that organ. So how to detect it? Take samples from every organ? Seems impractical.

Gene Screening For Recruitment: There is another way that genetic technology will change athletics: genetic screening to choose the most promising athletes for training and recruitment. This will be done for reasons other than pure performance potential. Proneness to injuries and ability to heal from injuries will surely be found to have strong genetic components. So an NFL football club faced with a difficult choice may well opt for the fellow who is less likely to be sidelined by injuries.

Repair That Improves Function: Another conflict will arise over the question of gene therapy for injury repair. It is inevitable that some gene therapy will be developed that will, for instance, repair a ligament that makes it even better than new. Many people in the general public will decide that if their ligament was weak enough to get injured in the first place why not apply a treatment that will make it stronger. Will an organization like the IOC allow athletes to do the same? if they do then injured athletes who have been treated and healed will be more capable than those who haven't yet suffered injuries.

Pro Sports and Ratings: I predict that there will be professional sports organizations that decide to allow it. Look at pro wrestling which is a sport that is as much about entertainment as it is about physical prowess. Also, look at the circuits travelled by former Olympic skaters. The audiences just want to see a beautiful show. The injuries experienced by pro skaters in their 30s or 40s will be dealt with using the latest in genetic therapy. The ability to pull in crowds and have good TV ratings will outweigh the sorts of concerns that motivate the managers of Olympic sports.

Ballet and Gene Therapy: There are occupations that are similar to athletics in that they place special demands on the body and cause much higher rates of career-threatening injuries. The best example is ballet. Injuries to muscles, ligaments, and tendons are frequent occurrences and too often career ending. I expect gene therapy to improve ligaments and tendons will become very common among ballet dancers.

Genetically Engineered Children: The IOC has banned gene therapy for athletic enhancement. But what happens when inevitably someone uses genetic engineering techniques to choose genes for their children before the children are even conceived? Are all such children to be banned from Olympic sports and other amateur sports? Parents may enhance their children by using genetic variations found elsewhere in the human population which they themselves do not possess. In these cases it will not even be possible to detect this sort of genetic engineering unless genetic samples are taken from the official parents and compared to the genetic sequence of the athlete.