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This was a wonderful meeting where I had a chance to taste a little of the Malaysian lifestyle. It was a bit of a flying visit, but thoroughly worthwhile. The conference was the first major conference of this department, which is very well positioned withiin the university (of over 100,000 students!).
Conference website available online. My paper was titled Posthuman Sport
This was an excellent meeting, which is devloping into a book publication. Beatriz Garcia and I were brought in to this collaboration between the Communication University of China and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania by Professor Tian (Tina) Zhihui, star blogger and expert on all that is the Web. At this meeting, Beatriz and I gave a paper titled 'The New Media at the Olympics: Citizen Journalists and the Non-Accredited Media'.
Last friday, I chaired a meeting at UK Sport on the following topic. Much more to follow on this one.... Genetic Technology and Sport: Focus on Genotyping, Genetic Tests and Selection
Date: 29 September, 2006. Time: 1330-1530 Host and Location: UK Sport, 40 Bernard Street, London, WC1N 1ST Travel Advice: Subway: opposite Russell Square Tube Station (Piccadilly Line); Bus: numbers 10, 30, 68, 73, 91, 168 to Euston Station and a 10 min Walk; car: Contact UK Sport in advance to arrange car parking facilities: tel: 0207 7211 5100. Map of Location: see final page of this document (Appendix III).
Participants Dr Peter Fricker (Australian Institute of Sport) Dr Wendy Hiscox (London) Ms Alison Holloway (UK Sport) Professor Barrie Houlihan (Loughborough) Dr Andy Miah (Paisley) Dr Yannis Pitsiladis (Glasgow) Dr Emma Rich (Loughborough) Professor Julian Savulescu (Oxford) John Scott (Director of International Programs, UK Sport) Dr Alun Williams (Manchester Metropolitan)
Agenda
1330-1345 Introduction & Background Dr Andy Miah
1345-1410 The Science of Genetic Tests for Performance Dr Alun Williamson
Respondent Dr Yannis Pitsiladis
1415-1440 The Australian Perspective Dr Peter Fricker
1440-1530 General Discussion: Ethics, Law, Policy Chair, Professor Julian Savulescu
Key Questions
• What are genetic tests for performance and how do they work? (Science) • What are the ethical implications of such tests, both in the administration of them and their effect on the ethics of sport? (Medical and Research Ethics; Sport Ethics) • What is the legal status of these tests and how would regulation function in the context of international sport? (International Medical and Sport Law/Policy) • Should genetic tests for performance be used as part of the talent identification/selection process in elite sport? (General Moral Philosophical)
Brief
Dear Colleague,
We are delighted that you can attend the meeting organised at UK Sport on 29 September on genotyping, genetic tests and selection. During this meeting, we will hear from Dr Peter Fricker at the Australian Institute of Sport about the work that has taken place in Australia in relation to this subject. Since around 2001, Australia has made considerable investments into studies that aim to identify ‘performance genes’ and it has spent extensive time discussing the legal and ethical implications of such research and the use of genetic information more broadly (Australian Law Reforms Commission, 2003).
This work provides the context for our conversations, which have become all the more pertinent given two important developments. First, WADA’s second landmark meeting on Gene Doping concluded with a specific statement about the appropriateness of identifying performance genes and using them within the talent selection process (see Appendix I). Second, the first commercial genetic test for performance had already been introduced to various countries (see Appendix II).
This brief meeting will discuss the ethics and policy implications of legislation surrounding the use of genetic tests for enhanced health characteristics. The majority of attention on genetic tests in the UK has been limited to prenatal or pre-implantation testing, where the Human Genetics Commission explains the opportunities and dangers arising from the widespread use of such tests. The HGC and other organisations are generally dismissive of the need to consider selection for ‘enhancement’ purposes. Yet, it is unclear whether or how regulation will extend to postnatal testing for enhanced health. Our intention is to establish some conclusions and recommendations to inform this emerging debate.
This symposium is organised by invitation only and is hosted by UK Sport. We regret that we are unable to fund travel expenses or speakers’ fees for this one-off meeting, but anticipate that this might be the first of a series of meetings on this topic.
Please find attached 2 documents, which we would ask you to read before the meeting to avoid time spent on background details. Given the limited time we will have, participants are asked to consider, in advance, how their expertise in ethics, law, policy or science can inform the debate about the use of genetic information in sport.
Yours Sincerely,
Dr Andy Miah Professor Julian Savulescu University of Paisley, UK University of Oxford, UK e: email@andymiah.net e: julian.savulescu@philosophy.oxford.ac.uk t: +44 (0)7891 850497 t: +44 (0) 1865 286888
Bibliography
This list of references encompasses references to other major works in the area of genetic tests for performance characteristics.
Australia Law Reforms Commission (2003). Alrc 96: Essentially Yours.
Houlihan, B. M. J. (2004). "Civil Rights, Doping Control and the World Anti-Doping Code." Sport in Society 7(3): 420-437.
Human Genetics Commission (2006). Making Babies: Reproductive Decisions and Genetic Technologies.
Miah, A. and E. Rich (2006). "Genetic Tests for Ability? Talent Identification and the Value of an Open Future." Sport, Education & Society 11(3): 259-273.
O'Leary, J., Ed. (2001). Drugs and Doping in Sport: Socio-Legal Perspectives. London, Cavendish Publishing Limited.
Pitsiladis, Y. and R. Scott (2005). "The Makings of the Perfect Athlete." The Lancet: Special Supplement on Sport and Medicine 366: S16-S17.
Savulescu, J. and B. Foddy (2005). "Comment: Genetic Test Available for Sports Performance." British Journal of Sports Medicine 39: 472.
Spriggs, M. (2004). "Compulsory Brain Scans and Genetic Tests for Boxers - or Should Boxing Be Banned?" Journal of Medical Ethics 30: 515-516.
This week I gave a keynote at the first international conference on sport technology and develoment at the lovely city of Shah Alam. The Universiti Teknologi Mara did a great job with this meeting and it was fascinating to spend some time around Kuala Lumpur and the neighbouring regions (just dont take any food if you visit the Batu Caves)
This week, I will be giving an invited paper at the ECSS Annual meeting. This is really a special meeting for me as I see a lot of friends from a range of areas. It's also big, but not too big and this year takes me back to Lausanne again. I spent two months in Lausanne during the Spring of 2001 and it'll be great to be there once more. The presentation is within a session on Medical Ethics and Sports Medicine and I will speak to the following title: 'Steroids Aren't Cool': Criminalising Enhancement and the Politics of Healthcare Ethics. It should be a fun session.
Originally uploaded by andymiah.
Today (ok, last week - 21 June), I attended the first session of the government inquiry into HETs in Sports. It was the first time I had visited Westminster Palace and what more suitable occasion could there have been? I have been in touch with the Committee’s secretariat these last few months, chipping in with my suggestions about possible areas of inquiry. I arrived to the Palace around 845am, after an early morning down from Liverpool. Eventually finding Committee Room 6, it was nice to see some familiar faces. The Committee had kindly reserved seats for myself and Nick Bostrom offering us an opportunity to offer some pointed observations. Typically, the celebrity speaker – Linford Christie – arrived fashionably late and it was a personal pleasure to have heard him speak on this topic. I don’t have many childhood heroes and I was hardly a child when Linford was at his peak, but he remains one of my significant others in the sports world and I still have strong memories of him lining up for the beginning of a 100m race and even his running style. He was characteristically entertaining and upbeat about the issues and I took great care to notice his reactions to the various points of debate. It struck me that this man of such great sporting achievement remains a young athlete who was passionate about something he could do very well. In some ways, athletes are the Peter Pans of our modern day, defying the ageing process and defying human limits in the process.
The debate itself was most certainly engaging and a great starting point. Julian stepped up an offered a ‘let them take drugs’ position, while some of the audience members either cringed at the thought or were frustrated at being back to the position they were in 40, 20, 8 or 5 years ago, depending what landmark you use. However, I think this Committee is ready to ask difficult questions about the legitimacy of current doping regulations and Julian's position was certainly not shouted down. In fact, I think many people in this world of sport see the current regulations as a moral crusade, which is shielding the fact that this is an unworkable situation.
I have some concerns that the points of debate will be reduced primarily to doping discussions, when I believe the form of this Inquiry should be broader. There are a number of technologies that have not yet been discussed and we need to consider those too.
Well, I don’t want to get into my specific responses here. These will be submitted to the Committee in due course. I’m just very glad that this is happening. When I met Dr Ian Gibson MP in my home city of Norwich one afternoon in July after the publication of Genetically Modified Athletes, this was the very kind of inquiry we were discussing. Unlikely though it is that our conversation led to this initiative, I’ll happily tell the story that way! (thank you very much!). After all, as Phil Wills, Chair of the Inquiry said at the beginning of this morning, this is the very first time in history that the British government has looked into such a subject. And I would have been just happy to be an ‘also-ran’.
I just arrived into Denver, where the weather is not looking great. This is bad news as I have booked a Harley Davidson for a day at the end of the ACSM meeting. It is my first time at ACSM and I am really looking forward to it. I have heard so much about this meeting over the years. As always at science/medical meetings, I spend most of my time listening and trying to make sense of it all. Our session is invited by the ACSM and is about Gene Doping. The panel includes Gary Wadler from New York Medical School, Olivier Rabin from WADA and is Chaired by Stephen Roth at the University of Maryland.
After this, I conclude my USA whirlwind trip and look forward to getting back in the UK for a while. First thing to do - besides marking, etc - will be to obtain a China tourist visa for Beijing in the summer. I gather they can take some time to obtain.
I have been invited to speak at this meeting in September. The brochures came through the post the other week and it looks like an excellent meeeting. It covers a whole range of technological issues, which is precisely what I have argued for over the last few years. I'm not saying that I've influenced anything, but it's at least nice to go to a meeting with this range of approaches to the roles of technology in sport.
William Hurlbut and Erik Davis
Originally uploaded by andymiah.
I'm now at the Stanford meeting, which has a very good attendance. IT is particularly good to see the likes of Chris Gray here, bringing together the philosophy/law and the cultural studies of technology.
The 42nd Annual meeting of the ACSM takes place in Denver (Colorado) this year. It will be the first ACSM meeting I have attended and I have been invited to be part of a symposium on 'gene doping'. The other panellists include Stephen Roth (Chair, U. of Maryland), Ted Friedmann (WADA), Olivier Rabin (WADA), and Gary Wadler (NYU). It should be an exciting event.
In May this year, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies conference takes place at Stanford UniversityLaw School under the title indicated above. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and Stanford Program in Ethics and Society.
I will talk here about the 'criminalisation of enhancement' re-acting to recent moves within the US and elsewhere to frame enhancement as a social deviant practice that ought to involve criminal action.
This month I speak at the spring meeting of BASEM. The title of the event is 'Novel Treatment Approaches in Sports Medicine' (26-27 April, The Belfry, Warwickshire) and I will discuss the related areas of bioethics, science communiation and media studies. Others on the programme include:
Dr Hakan Alfredson on Neovascularisation and its Management
Dr Jacque le Coz on Mesotherapy
Professor Strek on Cryo-Chamber treatment.
The brief for the event is 'to examine the evidence base underpinning some unusual and novel treatment approaches including mesotherapy, actovegan, traumeel, autologous blood injections, hyperbaric oxygen and the current status of stem cell research' The invitation to speak here arose out of a presentation I gave last year for UK Sport. It's great to have a presence on this programme, particularly as it seems to reflect the increasing interest in ethical debates within the biosciences.
Abstract of Presentation
Genetically Modified Athletes?: Bioethics, Science Communication and the Media By Dr Andy Miah, University of Paisley, UK
This paper examines dimensions of ethical debates surrounding novel treatment approaches to sports medicine. It argues that ethical problems must be situated in discussions surrounding science communication, which draw on a critical understanding of media structures. In this context, the paper argues for a ‘public engagement with ethics’ (Miah, 2005a) where this requires consideration of the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of the biosciences and biomedicine.
To explore this thesis, the novel treatment of gene transfer is considered in some depth. The application of gene transfer to elite sports performance has a particularly rich recent history for this purpose. The subject of ‘gene doping’ has generated considerable amounts of debate within ethical, policy and science spheres (Miah, 2004). Moreover, the subject area exists within a recurrent media structure – the prospect of the ‘genetically modified athlete’. To this extent, it is comparable to other major topics in the biomedical sciences, such as human cloning, which similarly has generated recurrent news stories and which also lacks an established evidence base. Questions concerning the ethical issues surrounding novel treatments are of particular relevance given the recent launch of a governmental inquiry into ‘Human Enhancement Technologies in Sport’ (March, 2006). Of particular significance is understanding whether novel treatments can be easily categorised as therapeutic within policy and, if not, what implications this has for their use within elite sport. The paper concludes with some suggestions for informing this inquiring, based on a critique of anti-doping policy (Miah, 2005b).
References
Miah, A. (2004). Genetically Modified Athletes: Biomedical Ethics, Gene Doping and Sport. London and New York, Routledge. Miah, A. (2005a). "Genetics, cyberspace and bioethics: why not a public engagement with ethics?" Public Understanding of Science 14(4): 409-421.
Miah, A. (2005b). "From anti-doping to a 'performance policy': sport technology, being human, and doing ethics." European Journal of Sport Science 5(1): 51-57.
Science and Technology Select Committee (2006, March 1). New Inquiry: Human Enhancement Technologies in Sport. Select Committee for Science and Technology, British Government.
I have created a flickr photo set from the meeting.
Here I am at the Oxford meeting, which is one of the most exciting and interesting I have attended. Major names are here from all kinds of disciplinary perspectives, philosophy, sociology, natural science. The sun is even shining here! The level of the debate is high and many issues exciting. I have already had conversations with Joel Garreu, James Hughes, Julian Savulescu, William Sims Bainbridge, Lee Silver and a representative from the House of Commons Select Committee for Science and Technology. My session on 'rethinking enhancement in sport' was lively and I got the felt that these issues are just beginning for us all. There's a great deal left to be done.
I even signed a couple of copies of 'Genetically Modified Athletes', which happened to be in the Blackwell book stand!
Mary Douglas is now up to speak!
The conference is still undeway here and we are now in a session on credibility in science, a big issue for this meeting.The photo here is from my session yesterday, which I shared with Professor Julian Savulescu, from Oxford. Great meeting.
Here I am sitting with 3 students from the GSA talking about the merits of wordpress and how it can provide many more facilities compared with other blogs. Kris, you have convinced me that this is worthwhile and I even went pro with Flick and I even talked about your work in the lecture. How much more of a rock star does that make you feel?
After a fascinating series of presentations at the Stockholm meeting, we concluded proceednigs with a drafting of a declaration on gene doping. I think of particular interest was the stance taken on the use of genetic tests. This might raise a number of challenges for those who are already using them, though the declration does not forbid the use of such tests.
From 4-5 December, the World Anti-Doping Agency hosts its second Gene Doping symposium in Stockholm Sweden. They have already issues a press release for this meeting and, like the NYC meeting in 2002, the proceedings are closed to the media and by invitation only. At the meeting, I will give a reply to Dr Thomas H. Murray, President of The Hastings Center as part of a session on the ethics and policy implications of gene doping for sport.
One of the greatest catalysts for media coverage at the first meeting was Lee Sweeney's statement that he had been contacted by coaches and athletes who wish to enrol in gene therapy trials, in order to boost their performances. For the media and many other interested parties, this made the issue real and present.
It is likely that this meeting will present some advance on whether detection will be possible and I will argue for a re-definition of the ethics of sport based on a couple of recent pieces I have written. The first - published in the journal Public Understanding of Science - will advance a critique on the way in which gene doping has been discussed in society; the second - published in the European Journal of Sport Science - will argue that anti-doping policy should be replaced with a 'performance policy'.
Together, my conclusion will state that a rejection of gene transfer on the basis of current arguments implied and explicit within anti-doping policy is not justified. The two references are as follows:
Miah, A. (2005). "Genetics, cyberspace and bioethics: why not a public engagement with ethics?" Public Understanding of Science 14(4): 409-421.
Miah, A. (2005). "From anti-doping to a 'performance policy': sport technology, being human, and doing ethics." European Journal of Sport Science 5(1): 51-57.
Before this becomes incredibly out of date, I must mention the post-/trans- humanism session that took place at the conference on Ethics and Philosophy of Emerging Medical Technologies at Institut Borja de Bioetica, Universitat Ramon Llul, Barcelona, Spain in August 2005. The meeting was a joint annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy of Medicine and Healthcare and the European Association of Centres for Medical Ethics. I gave a paper on Posthuman Medicine and Imagined Ethics, which discussed a number of the futuristic scenarios posed by trans/post humanists, asking what legitmacy they have in critical, current debates on medicine and health care. It was particularly interesting to hear the term posthumanism in a number of papers, including Prof. Ruth Chadwick's keynote address on the definition and meaning of enhancement.
I do not think that posthumanism and transhumanism are informed by the same literature, nor are they speaking with the same intentions. I argued as much in my paper.
Other papers in my session, which itself was titled 'Transhumanism and Posthumanity" were:
F. torralba (Spain) What does posthumanity mean?
G. Weikert (Germany) Transhumanism - Hothouse of Mankind [this presenter did not attend]
We had a very engaging debate after the presentations, though I think there remains considerable skepticism for this proposed future, from within the medical community. Many doctors see the transformation of the human species within these terms, which is far from what they see as their role. This presents considerable challenges for advocates of technological enhancement; they have a considerable number of medical professionals to contend with.
Before I forget, I must mention something about the Barcelona meeting (Ethics and Philosophy of Emerging Medical Technologies, Institut Borja de Bioetica, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain), since sport appeared in a good handful of papers including: Keynote paper on Therapy and Enhancement Professor Ruth Chadwick
Argued in favour of the term 'improvement' rather than enhancement, as a basis for characterising the ethical issues arising from emerging technologies.
Ethical norms for research on biomedical enhancement susing human subjects Professor Max Mehlman
Max has written considerably on genetic enhancement and regularly uses sport as a case study in his work. The military was also a theme and there are some great analogies between sport and the military.
Honorary session for Lennart Nordernfelt
Thomas Schramme developed a case to inquire into the concept of 'health' the focus of this session and a tribute to Nordenfelt who gave an introduction and reply. Schramme's case discussed Lily, an athlete who wanted to jump 2m. He argued that Nordernfelt's work would argue that her inability to jump this high would qualify as failing to meet a vital goal and that, therefore, we could characterise it as an illness that should be alleviated by medicine. In short, we would characterise her less than healthy.
Schramme rejected the idea that this inability should be characterised as an illness and rejected the idea that the realisation of all vital goals falls within the proper role of medcine. Nordenfelt agreed with Schramme's conclusion, but did not accept that Lily's interest to jump 2m could be described as a vital goal. Being the best is not a reasonable expectation, but being good is.
Athlete or Guinea Pig? Sports and Enhancement Research Nancy M.P. King and Richard Robeson
Argued that medicine for the athlete should be characterised as enhancement research, but currently it is not. This led to some interesting debates about whether sport technology should go through a more rigorous liability check and whether this should be connected to anti-doping policy. I argue for this in my 2005 piece in the European Journal of Sport Science, though their emphasis is on medical procedures. I wonder whether blood spinning might fall within this category.
Finally, there was my wee paper
Posthuman Medicine & Imagined Ethics Developed posthuman theory in relation to transhumanism and cyborgology and subsequently argued for the need to consider imagined ethical issues. Used the gene doping case as an example of an 'imagined ethical' debate.
