Today, one of the world’s leading journal Science published an essay by Ted Friedmann, Olivier Rabin and Mark S. Frankel on the likely use of gene doping in sport (Friedmann et al. 2010, Is Gene Doping a threat to sport?, Science). Over the years, I’ve been on numerous panels, interviews and projects with Friedmann and Rabin and even reviewed this article – favourably – before it was publised. Both authors work with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA); Rabin is on staff as their Science Director, Friedmann is Chair of WADA’s Gene Doping Expert Group and has performed research sponsored by WADA. Frankel, the third author and lead correspondent is staff at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the publisher of the journal Science. We have not met.

Compared to these authors, my views on the nature of sport are quite different, but we each agree that a) the use of gene transfer in sport is likely and b) the broad societal use of gene transfer in society would bring into question WADA’s mandate. My interactions with Ted Friedmann, in particular, have been the kinds of exchanges one would always want from colleagues, particularly adversaries. So, it’s with great pleasure that I offer an update on my views about gene doping, as a counter point to their essay.

I was tempted to contact Science directly and ask them to publish this, but it surely wouldn’t come out until after the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, which is the most immediate landmark when this conversation will have currency. The timing of Friedmann et al. is thus perfectly placed to do WADA’s work of indicating that it is going to solve the gene doping problem, but there needs to be a counter argument in place.

Forgive me if some sentences are a little sketchy, this was put together in a couple of hours.

PS: My book Genetically Modifed Athletes (2004) has just been translated into Portuguese by the Brazilian publisher Phorte – roll on Rio 2016.

Gene Doping: A reality, but not a threat

by Professor Andy Miah / +44 7891 850 497 / email@andymiah.net / in Vancouver from 17-26 Feb  [feel welcome to republish this essay]

The world of elite sport has spent nearly 10 years investigating the science of gene doping. Back in 2001, they were very much ahead of the game, as therapeutic gene transfer was only just beginning to demonstate efficacy, though over this period, achievements in gene therapy have been limited. Nevertheless, the modus operandi of WADA over this decade is that gene transfer presents a real, technical possibility that requires scrutiny and action. Indeed, it is anticipated that athletes will soon try to use the same science to enhance their performances. It may even happen at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.

Within anti-doping policy, genetic enhancement has been characterised as an illegal form of performance enhancement since 2003, in large part, because it would constitute an illegal use of medical technology for a non-medical purpose. In this sense, gene doping is treated in the same way as other doping methods. Yet, will this decision to treat it as morally impermissible stand the test of time, in an era where people are increasingly willing to modify themselves?

Such a speculation has no place in clinical practice and has only limited value for regulatory authorities who are, rightly, focused on making the practices they govern as safe as possible. Yet, the broader questions that gene doping presents are about how humanity envisages its future. Moreover, how we attend to this imminent technology today will affect how we regard it in years to come. As such, we cannot simply retreat to the view that genetic enhancement is mere science fiction. Indeed, it is widely recognized that the science of gene doping is already a technological reality.

I envisage a future for humanity where gene transfer – and many other forms of human enhancement – is sufficiently safe for its widespread use and where it becomes an integral part of our pursuit of good health. Indeed, undertaking such modifications would be considered as normal as body piercing or cosmetic surgery. Such attempts to promote our health will become increasingly important in an evermore-toxic world and will create a scenario where the population is, as a whole, more capable of performing in extreme conditions – such as elite sports competition.

Yet, this isn’t just a matter for sports to decide, as the legitimate use of gene transfer in sport will undoubtedly be preceded by its legitimate use in society more generally. Thus, non-athletes would also be using gene transfer to improve their competitive edge in the world or their overall functional capabilities, rather like obtaining a good education, eating the right food or stimulating our cognitive abilities by mental exercises.

An important ethical distinction in medicine is made between decisions that are made on behalf of someone and those that we choose to do for our own potential gain. The forms of genetic enhancement I have discussed thus far are broadly self-regarding, in that they only after the biology of the person to whom the modification has been made. In contrast, we might decide to genetically modify our hereditary genes – the germ-line – to ensure that subsequent generations have an advantage in life or, at least, are not made to suffer serious illnesses. This raises additional ethical concerns, which have yet to enter the radar of WADA, due to their seeming even more remote.

Nevertheless, in both cases, genetic enhancement should, first, be seen as an attempt to increase the resilience of the body to illness and injury, rather than as a radical shift towards transhuman enhancements. We wouldn’t be genetically design high-jumpers, but would instead amplify a range of biological parameters – such as height – which may translate into characteristics that would be optimal for certain kinds of physical activity. As such, the more radical prospects of gene transfer – such as genetically enhancing an embryo to be a good athlete – should be treated as science fiction.

In any case, it is not just these clear-cut instances of non-medical enhancements that will present difficult moral issues to solve. Even harder cases arise when considering whether gene transfer could be used to treat modestly debilitating conditions, such as asthma. Overall, we may conclude that a person would be better of without such conditions, but in the case of selecting embryos, we would be hard pressed to justify the use of pre-implantation genetic selection for such purposes. Any woman to have gone through pre-implantation cycles, in order to avoid passing on some heritable condition, will know that it makes no sense to talk of going through such an ordeal were it not to avoid only the most severe health risks for the prospective child.

Yet, when it comes to individuals modifying themselves – rather than their offspring, other forms of argumentation are required to justify their prohibition.. In actual fact, WADA’s precedent for permitting therapeutic use means that genetically modified athletes can compete; they just need a doctor to approve the medical use of the doping substance. This is why WADA is particularly anxious about monitoring whether athletes are enrolling into gene transfer clinical trials. It is also why the world of sport is anxious when there appears to be a higher rate of therapeutic use within the athlete population, compared to the general population, as it may imply that athletes are either gaining fake prescriptions or that there is some more sinister medical collusion to enhance athletes.

The challenge for the sports world is not just that gene transfer would be used to break the rules, but that the therapeutic use of gene transfer may create athletes who are even more capable than the so-called healthy athlete. Intimations of this shift are occurring in the context of Paralympic sport, where the prosthetically enhanced athlete is beginning to surpass the so-called able-bodied athlete, as in the case of South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius.

One of the big challenges that will determine whether WADA’s gene doping problem can be solved is their ability to detect it. Yet, the present absence of detection methods, coupled with shifting social values on the morality of enhancement challenges the integrity and relevance of an anti-enhancement movement like anti-doping.

There are already indications of what a sports world full of commercial genetic products might look like. In 2004, the first commercial genetic test for a performance gene emerged on the market, the SportsGeneTest™ commercialised by Genetic Technologies (Australia). Tests of this kind were condemned by WADA at its landmark meeting on gene doping in 2005. WADA is particularly concerned that such tests might discourage young athletes from participating in sport, just because their genetic profile doesn’t match the ideal type for a given sport.

Yet, it is unlikely that WADA’s advice on the use of genetic tests will have any wider societal impact on the use of tests for more general use. Moreover, even if such tests are frowned upon – in part because their validity is dubious – it is doubtful that the potential harm from their use would be sufficiently serious to warrant their prohibition.

While the same analysis is not likely to hold for medically invasive modifications, like gene transfer, it will be for society to decide how it permits people to accumulate biocultural capital via human enhancements. Yet, rather than devaluing sports, I suspect that there will be considerable interest to witness and experience the extraordinary achievements of genetically modified athletes whom will still be worthy of our admiration. They will still train, struggle and achieve as athletes do today. The only difference will be that their edge over each oither will be determined by chosen genetic differences, rather than those wrought by the genetic lottery. On this basis, gene doping should not be seen as a threat to sport, but an opportunity for it to redefine its boundaries and, potentially, work towards the development of safer forms of performance enhancement.

On this final point, I was quoted today in the Edmonton Journal and Vancouver Sun for saying that gene doping my be safer than other doping practices and that it might not be that bad. The critical point here is that, if we are able to develop the technology under controlled conditions, then there’s a greater chance of ending up with a safer form of enhancement since, unlike synthetic products, genetic augmentation will be more closely aligned to our indviidaul biochemistry.

I see nothing morally problematic about utilizing genetic technology to promote health and if the consequence of such actions is that we all become as capable of sprinting as Usain Bolt, then all the better. Admittedly, he may have to work a little harder to win the race, but, as we saw from  his performance at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, that wouldnt be such a difficult task.

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This lecture will be written up for the Huffington Post. Keep watching.

All students are wellcome. Place a comment in this website, if you’d like to attend. It’s on ou Hamilton campus from 1:30pm.

Image (C) VANOC / COVAN

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Just published on the H+ website. Please cite their version and remember, the essay is about creating new life forms, which will explore and appropriate outer space environments, not our discovery of life forms. That said, in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, this year is when we will discover alien life.

Photo credit (above): NASAHQ on Flickr

Extraterrestrial Ethics

by Andy Miah

“At the core of NASA’s future space exploration is a return to the moon, where we will build a sustainable long term human presence” (NASA website, 2009)

2009 was a great year for space exploration! The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing marked a new era for our future in space. Key landmarks include the European Space Agency’s appointment of its first European Commander to the International Space Station. In October, the 60th International Astronautical Congress took place in South Korea. Then there were continuing attempts from South Korea to launch its first rocket in the aftermath of the ongoing controversy about North Korea’s testing of rocket technology in outer space. NASA even managed to identify water on the moon.

In a time of potentially catastrophic climate change, our need to consider the exploration of outer space is greater than ever. This need is made visible by the rise of various networks that are contributing to the establishment of governmental policies that will oversee our move into outer space, either as visitors or inhabitants. The importance of ethical debate within such conversations is signaled by the work of such organizations as UNESCO, which held its first congress on the ethics of outer space in 2004.

Applying ethical guidelines that will accommodate the wide and diverse interests of a global community presents considerable challenges and inhibits the willingness of space agencies to commit wholeheartedly to any such implementation. After all, haven’t societies been trying to find common ground on such values for at least half a century?

Are there no ethical principles we can share to help guide our colonization of outer space? If not, then how do we deal with some of the fundamental questions that govern such work? For instance, what obligations do we owe to the various life forms we send there, or those we might discover? Can we develop a more considerate approach to colonizing outer space than we were able to achieve for various sectors of Earth?

And what are our expectations of astronauts? What are we actually asking them to do and will they be aware of what they’re getting themselves into? Could our inevitable public surveillance of their behavior become too much of an infringement on their personal privacy? While it is tempting to believe that an astronaut’s time in outer space involves a lot of free floating antics and admiring the view, astronauts are hooked up to monitoring devices and poked and prodded ad infinitum to find out what happens to biology when it is outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

Humanity has a moral obligation to discover, create and support emergent life forms via space exploration. This obligation arises from the discovery itself, the mere possibility of developing such technology. However, to understand the value of such achievements and why we should pursue them further requires that we connect space exploration to a long chain of other discoveries that have incrementally extended our reach. Consider that the first liquid-fuelled rocket was launched in 1926 by the American Robert Goddard, the same year that John Logie Baird demonstrated the first true television system.

Our neglect of the intimate set of connections that describe technological histories limits our ability to make sense of present-day interventions or their politics. Moreover, our failure to use these achievements wisely limits our ability to survive as a species. I am not going to argue that the end is nigh unless we find a way of colonizing outer space, though there are some people that would find little difficulty in accepting this proposition. But our obligation goes beyond the pursuit of new frontiers for its own sake, or our own survival. To this end, the exploration of outer space is far from a luxury. Rather, it is an integral component of a flourishing society. Without pursuing the most complex scientific challenges, we will want for solutions to many of our immediate social needs. Moreover, the goods of space exploration far exceed the symbolic value of landing on the moon or orbiting the earth. A vast amount of research and development derives from space exploration. For example, the United Kingdom’s 2007 Space Policy inquiry indicated that the creation of space products contributes two to three times their value in GDP.

Admittedly, many will have reservations about investing into space exploration given ongoing economic doom and gloom. This is why we should derive our imperative from moral, rather than scientific reasons.

Consider for a moment the holy grail of space exploration: the discovery of life outside of Earth, not just some kind of water, but sentient life — the kind that has eyes. While there is a limit to how much one should be distracted by such ideas, it is useful to illustrate how the pursuit of extraterrestrials is increasingly aligned with other human practices.

After all, how should we treat the creation of new life forms, which derive from a range of cross-genetic breeding practices? Our own modification of the species pool through selection, modification, or transgenics creates a situation where distinct species properties emerge as a result of radical human-made interventions. We might even claim that such interventions transcend evolutionary processes.

In what sense should such entities be reasonably claimed as Earthly? When an asteroid enters the Earth – or when a shuttle returns – does our planet become less Earthly? It seems to me that we need to debunk the idea that Earth can be treated as an isolated structure, since we know it is not. We are already extraterrestrial in the most meaningful sense of the term. Thus, extraterrestrial ethics applies to life in general. It meets with the expansion of recently developed concepts such as ecosystem health as a broad area of moral concern along with the principle of procreative beneficence — the idea that our capacities of begetting new lives should be utilized to optimize human flourishing in its broadest sense. It promotes the principle of autonomy, while recognizing that individual decisions have consequences for others.

For me, the appeal of pursuing outer space begins with the imagination of new life forms. It is necessary that we consider our obligations to such lives and what responsibilities we should articulate for their continued survivability.

Decades after the beginnings of the first space race began, the next giant leap for humanity seems more to do with coming to terms with what we want from the next era of space exploration. To answer this question, we will need more than just scientists to tell us what is possible.

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From Usain Bolt to Rafa Nadal, top sports stars are fitter, faster and stronger than ever. But how long will it be before the pursuit of perfection takes all the drama out of sport

* David Runciman

* The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010

Rafael Nadal serves

Rafael Nadal serves. Photograph: Ballesteros/EPA

At the end of his novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Julian Barnes imagines what it would be like to play golf in heaven. His first round is suitably blissful – he shoots 67, 20 shots better than any of his previous, Earth-bound efforts hacking round the local course, and everything just feels right. But because this is heaven, he has the time to keep getting better, and he does, improving his score into the low 60s, then on into the 50s, always driving the green, always holing his putts. Soon his target score is in the 40s, but why stop there? “My game has improved no end, I thought, and repeated the words no end to myself.” One day, he realises, he would go round in 18 shots. “And then what? Had anyone, even here, played a golf course in 17 shots?”

There is something essentially absurd about the pursuit of sporting perfection, because when sport gets too easy it becomes increasingly pointless. One of the most satisfying of sports jokes also happens to be about the tribulations of playing golf in heaven. One day, St Peter and Jesus decide to play a round, and St Peter, who has bought all the latest equipment, tees off. He hits a lovely drive, straight down the middle of the fairway. Jesus, who is dressed in a miserable smock and playing with some old wooden clubs, hooks his tee-shot and it’s heading out of bounds. But then an angel appears from nowhere and bats the ball back into play with one of its wings. Down swoops the dove of peace, who catches the ball in its beak and flies all the way to the green, dropping it just in time for the Holy Spirit to come up and blow the ball gently into the hole. St Peter turns to Jesus with a sigh. “Do you wanna play golf,” he says, “or do you wanna fuck around?”

The fear for many people today is that it is rapidly advancing technology, rather than divine intervention, that risks turning sport into a joke. The scope for us to mess around – not just with the rules, or the equipment, but with the human body itself – threatens to make a mockery of traditional accomplishments, as records are shattered and games transformed. This presents a real dilemma for anyone contemplating how to manage the future of sport.

All sports, particularly professional sports, are constantly on the lookout for superhuman performers who can transcend what people thought was possible. The paying public demands as much. But they also have to be careful that these same players don’t make the sport look ridiculous. It is often a fiendishly difficult balance to strike.

When Tiger Woods arrived on the professional golf scene, he was widely recognised as the saviour of a sport that had become a dull parade of plump, indistinguishable white men huffing and puffing their way around the course. His father, Earl Woods, even went so far as to call him “the Chosen One” and claimed that he would “do more than any other man to change the course of humanity”. We now know for sure that whatever else he might be, Woods is definitely not Jesus. But back then there were those who worried that Woods was too far ahead of the rest of the field, a fear that seemed to be confirmed when he won his first Masters in 1997 by a ludicrous 12 shots. So various courses, including the Augusta National, were “Tiger-proofed”, making them longer and tougher.

The aim wasn’t to stop Woods winning – it was essential Woods keep winning for the financial good of the sport, and, if anything, these changes simply added to his advantages by making some holes almost impossible for his competitors. The idea was simply to stop Woods’s victories from looking like a stroll in the park. Yet in forcing Woods to work for it, the people running the game contrived to make his golf conservative and joyless, and eventually the courses had to be tweaked once more to allow some of the fun back in.

Golf is such an obviously artificial sport – with the players constantly tinkering with their equipment and the organisers fiddling with their pin positions – that endless readjustment is possible, to keep the game from becoming either too easy or too hard. But other sports have less room for manoeuvre. Athletics, for instance, needs its stars to keep breaking records in order to persuade the public to carry on watching. The trouble is, we are getting close to the limits of human physical capability – the rate at which records are likely to fall is slowing, and so is the margin by which improvements can be made. As a result, the more records actually do get broken, the more we become suspicious of how it was achieved.

Athletics aspires to an ideal of natural human excellence: it is meant to be a pure competition of the strongest, the fastest, the fittest. But there is something increasingly unnatural about athletic achievement at the highest level – it is by definition an abnormal accomplishment – and something even more unnatural about the idea that human beings can keep getting faster ad infinitum. So the sport’s authorities are engaged in an endless battle to celebrate the “right” sort of athletic achievement while clamping down on the “wrong” kind.

Take last year’s World Athletic Championships in Berlin, which saw two freakish performances, though each was treated completely differently. The “good” freak was Usain Bolt, who smashed the world records in both the 100m and 200m by margins that had seemed impossible before he came on the scene. The “bad” freak was Caster Semenya, who annihilated the field in the women’s 800m, but immediately fell under suspicion because she looks too much like a man. What is the difference between them? Only that in Semenya’s case we can see what makes her different from her fellow competitors and in Bolt’s we can’t be sure.

With Semenya, we know what’s going on – she has an unusual genetic make-up that has given her a combination of male and female sexual characteristics. But how does Bolt achieve his astonishing speeds? He is taller than most sprinters, but that only makes it odder, because his height should be a disadvantage. What’s more, Semenya fell some way short of the women’s 800m world record, which still stands from the era when steroid-fuelled athletes from eastern Europe dominated women’s athletics. So she is by no means as freakish as some. On the other hand, Bolt runs faster than any human being in history, which means he must be doing something that has never been done before. Yet still we celebrate Bolt as the natural athletic genius, and we treat Semenya as an abomination.

The dilemma for anyone involved in top-level sport is knowing how to walk this line when the possibilities for the technological enhancement of natural ability is growing all the time. The temptation is to hark back to some golden age when these things were much clearer – back when men were men and talent could shine through.

The fact is that sport has always operated according to a double standard, as the authorities struggle to draw a clean distinction between what counts as natural talent and what counts as an unfair advantage. According to Vanessa Heggie, a historian of sports science at Cambridge, “there has never been a time when people weren’t worried that artificial techniques would ruin sport”. Originally, this fear extended to the idea of training itself – in the 1920s and 1930s there were regular complaints that athletes were gaining an unfair advantage by spending weeks or months building up to a race, when it was widely believed that sport was meant to be a competition to see who was better on the day itself.

Now we think training is good, but drugs, which were widely accepted back then (in the 1930s the Wolves manager Frank Buckley boasted about giving monkey glands to his players, in order to enhance their “natural” powers), are seen as bad. But as Heggie points out, a lot of sports medicine is simply about repairing the damage that training and then competition inflicts on the human body. “We patch sportsmen and women up,” she says, “so that they can carry on harming themselves and other people.” For years, it was feared that steroid abuse was doing untold damage to a generation of American football players. We now know that what has really been harming them is the routine concussions they pick up day after day in training.

Athletics is not a contact sport, but still it requires that people make themselves ill through relentless training in order to perform at the highest level. What’s more, stringent anti-drug rules mean that athletes can’t even take routine medication to treat their aches and pains. We are so obsessed with preserving some ideal of natural excellence that we have forgotten, in Heggie’s words, how “completely artificial all sport actually is”.

Andy Miah, professor of ethics and emerging technologies at the University of the West of Scotland, is one of Britain’s leading experts on artificial enhancement in sport. He thinks that we are spending our time worrying about the wrong things. He believes that our obsession with drugs has blinded us to the multitude of means that are now available to top athletes to enhance their performance – from altitude chambers to cooling boxes, which can freeze an athlete’s body parts in order to prevent overheating during a race.

Many of these techniques are relatively untested and most are only lightly regulated, if at all – the sheer volume of new scientific research, and the economic forces that are driving it, means that artificial enhancement in sport is more or less beyond regulation anyway. So Miah thinks that we should give up the fight to hold the line between “fair and unfair advantages”, and simply enjoy the full variety of sporting excellence, “wherever it comes from, so long as we are doing what we can to make it safe”.

Instead of worrying that artificial enhancement threatens the future of sport by making it unfair, Miah thinks there is a different prospect on the horizon which we should be much more concerned about. This is the threat posed by genetic testing for athletic attributes, which far from giving some top performers an unfair advantage, could end up making them all the same.

For the past few years, relatively cheap tests have become available which claim to identify, simply by means of a mouth swab, whether someone has a genetic predisposition towards certain kinds of athletic excellence – it could indicate, for instance, whether a young child is likely to do better in endurance or speed sports, or whether an athlete is likely to benefit from a particular training regime. One manufacturer (Atlas Sports Genetics) boasts that its SportGene Test “gives parents and coaches early information on their child’s genetic predisposition for success in team or individual speed/power or endurance sports”.

The risk here, as Miah points out, is not of genetic experimentation but of genetic determinism – the idea that certain body types are suited to certain kinds of sports, meaning that kids of a particular disposition are all pushed down the same path. In the US, genetic testing is being marketed at pushy parents wanting to give their offspring a head start on the path to sporting success.

Once upon a time, children would have to try out different sports to see if they were any good at them, which meant that people might excel in unexpected ways. Eric Bristow recalled that his dad, believing that all children were capable of being champions at something, tried his distinctly unathletic son out at every possible sport until as a last resort they had a go at darts, so proving the father right. Who knows what a genetic testing device would have prescribed for Bristow, but the fear is that many talented children won’t get the chance to experiment.

It is probably no coincidence that the sport where a demand for genetic testing first surfaced is rugby, with reports that it was being tried out by Australian teams back in 2005. In the past few years, rugby has been transformed out of all recognition by the demand for ever bigger, ever stronger players to counter the threat of the ever bigger, ever stronger players on the other teams. We have come a long way since the arrival on the scene of Jonah Lomu in the mid-1990s. Like Tiger Woods at roughly the same time, the 6ft 5in, 115kg winger threatened to make a mockery of his sport. After New Zealand’s 1995 World Cup match against England, in which Lomu had batted off the England players’ tackles like a full-grown adult thrown into an under-13 game, England captain Will Carling famously said: “He is a freak, and the sooner he goes away the better.” But Lomu wasn’t a freak – he was a forerunner of things to come.

Now rugby is full of players at least as big as Lomu, and all capable of bringing each other down. Many fear the sport is being ruined, with too many top players getting injured and too many games becoming sterile, attritional affairs. Playing around with genetic testing to find these supermen hasn’t prevented rugby from getting stuck in a rut: the obsession with size and strength has made it less like some brave new world of scientific enhancement and more like medieval warfare, a bloody mess. Each side knows what it needs to do to stop the other from advancing, and no one wants to try something different for fear of getting crushed.

Rugby is not the only sport to suffer from the physical stereotyping made possible by advanced training techniques. Tennis, particularly women’s tennis, has become increasingly predictable as large, muscular, identikit players try to out-thump and out-grunt each other. Certainly tennis is a sport that has been diminished by the increasing specialisation of young children, who get sent away to training camps at any early age so that they can make sure they develop the same skill-sets as everyone else. The fear, for parents, children and coaches alike, is of getting left behind.

It’s hard to imagine a touch player like John McEnroe, who only took up the game when he was eight and quickly evolved his own distinctive style of play, being allowed to develop like that today. Instead, the future seems more likely to belong to players such as Rafael Nadal and Juan Martín del Potro, who have the physical stature to make the most of their relentless training. There is no question that tennis is faster, tougher, more competitive than it has ever been. But it is also getting a little bit dull.

Still, there are grounds for hope. Justine Henin is returning to the sport, in the belief that her larger, more powerful opponents will have forgotten how to play someone with a single-handed backhand who doesn’t belt everything back. In the 1990s the men’s game looked set to be dominated by big servers with little or no finesse, but then along came Roger Federer to show that power coupled with finesse could still beat raw power. Even rugby will find a way out of its current impasse – it may need some rule changes, but eventually someone will work out a way to outwit pure muscle. You can’t stay stuck in medieval warfare for ever.

What people want from sport is drama, surprises, new achievements, regular gratifications, but also some element of mystery. They want things to keep on getting better, they just don’t want to know how it is all being done. The problem with athletes such as Semenya is that we can see the strings – we know what makes them different, because it’s all on the surface.

The same thinking lies behind the decision of the swimming governing body Fina to ban the performance-enhancing swimsuits that had been allowing world records to be broken with alarming frequency – it was too obvious that they were making all the difference. It made swimming look easy.

But Miah’s argument is that we have become fixated on our own stereotypes of what counts as unfair advantage – drugs, swimsuits, men posing as women – while we have little or no idea of what is going on behind the scenes in sports laboratories and training camps, where much of the latest forms of enhancement is taking place.

And Heggie goes further – we also have no idea what goes on inside athletes’ bodies, even discounting the problems of drug-testing. Poor Caster Semenya has endured the indignity of having her internal organs examined and discussed by the world’s media, in order to decide if she is a “real” woman. “But we don’t test male athletes to see who has the XYY chromosome,” Heggie says (this chromosomal disorder can lead to increased growth velocity during childhood, an important advantage in early sports selection). “To single out Semenya on the grounds of fairness and equity is simply ludicrous. What we call ‘unnatural’ is simply a reflection of racial bigotry and gender bigotry.” The problem is not in the athletes – it’s in us.

All top athletes are freaks of one kind or another – we just happen to prefer the kind who make their freakishness look natural. We want our sports stars to be godlike, but we also like to pretend they are not so different from the rest of us. However, they are different, and as time goes by they are likely to become ever more so. The real risk of technological advance is not that the elite performers become too remote from everyone else, but that they end up too much like each other, as all of them pursue the same artificial advantages. It won’t be easy to regulate sport in order to prevent it from becoming ridiculous. But there is no point in trying to keep it natural either – that battle was lost a long time ago.

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Various articles suggested that Zuckerberg had claimed privacy was dead. He didn’t say this, but he did indicate that he thought privacy had changed since the internet began and that we may need to re-think the concept today. He’s not the first to have mentioned this, but what merit is there in his view? Is privacy dead or dying?

I’ll leave aside the broader concerns about whether all of our waking life is now under surveillance ie. We’re caught on camera by CCTV 300 times a day on average in the uk urban environment and credit cards mean that all of our transactions are now made available to various third parties. Instead, I’ll focus on the leisure experience of life online.

Undoubtedly, life online is a much more visible affair today than it was when the Internet began. In part, this is because the web is now a much more visually centred enterprise, rather than just the text based environment it was in the early years. Of course, this relies on a theory of identity – are images and film more capable of revealing ourselves than text? Perhaps not.

Nevertheless, a lot of the early research talked about the negotiation of identity extensively, how early netizens played with gender, sexuality, etc. Today, people may be more visually present online than they ere previously, though this heightened visibility is only partially indicative of the relinquishing of privacy. Let’s consider some very simple statistical propositions.

• If 100% of users reveal 100% of their lives online, then we may claim that privacy is dead.
• If 100% of users display 80% of their lives online, but 10 years ago, only revealed 30% of their lives, then we may claim that privacy is dying.

However,

• If 100% of users share only 30% of their lives and, 10 years ago they revealed 10% of themselves, then we may not make any claims about the death of privacy. Moreover, we would have to know a lot more about what that additional 20% involves.

Instead of claiming that privacy is dying, we may, instead, claim that the additional functionality of the web permits a greater degree of personal expression than was previously possible. This allows many more people to find a way of sharing information about themselves. These people may still wish to keep many aspects of their lives private, but they are a much more confident and expressive population. This may also be a result of having matured as digital citizens.

Yet, privacy is very much alive and kicking, we just negotiate it in slightly more complicated ways and this can be disorientating. I expect that the stats about what people share vary considerably. 50% of users may reveal 80% of their lives, while the other 50% discuss only 5% of themselves. In my experience, people have very clear boundaries online, even if these are not enshrined within privacy policies. Consider a Facebook account. It is likely that many users are unaware of how their content is experienced by either their ‘friends’ or outsiders, but if asked, they may express vary precise expectations about their boundaries.

A big challenge is how we engage with privacy online. The era of reading privacy policies never really took off and there’s a lot more work needed to find ways of engaging people with how they define their privacy settings. I suspect that scrolling through an agreement and clicking ‘I accept’ doesn’t quite do the job. Perhaps we need some kind of digital game solution – a kind of role-play – through which we demonstrate how we feel about certain privacy issues.

Maintaining digital privacy is about a) ensuring that what we put online goes only so far as we would like and b) being allowed to keep offline those aspects of our lives that we would prefer not to share.

Consider Google Analytics or web history tracking devices – even cookies, remember the fuss about them? A lot of people may be anxious about an automated or default tracking device on their browser, while others will use programmes like Delicious to publicly bookmark sites of interest. Consider one difficult, but common example. If you have a medical condition that you prefer others not to know about, then it is desirable to protect browsing history from any tracking software. Yet, one of the difficulties with separating out privacy experiences is that our movements online are quite haphazard. One second we could be watching David Letterman clips on YouTube and, in a moment, we may be looking for information about a personal medical condition. When we switch from one search to another online, we do not go through the kinds of social conventions that are otherwise present – like the act of going to a doctor’s surgery, which involves a whole series of events: getting ready to go out, travelling to the surgery, entering the building, going to reception, perceiving other patients, sitting and waiting, etc.

The difficulty with privacy today is that those transitions are not always apparent online and that we are still trying to make sense of different types of space. The other day, I tweeted on how we should regard an email – whether it is treated as a concise published document – a definitive record of intended meaning – or as ‘thinking out loud’.

One problem with life online is that we haven’t found a good way of distinguishing types of communication intentions. For example, any institutional email message usually ends with an automated disclaimer about the content and people are often quite anxious about getting their words absolutely right. But, perhaps we should think of the written word online as more like the spoken word offline? Clearly environments like twitter and even sms fill this gap to some degree, but they don’t allow us to avoid the misunderstandings that often arise by the absence of body language.

Digital privacy today has even more interesting facets. If you’ve not yet discovered Stranger Chat, then this may be an interesting case study for assessing how our negotiation of identity online has changed. Stranger Chat – as the name suggests – involves logging into an environment and starting up a conversation with whoever else is online (eg. Omegle, Iddin). The dynamics of this experience make it even more difficult to make sense of how we continue to play with our identity online, but the starting point should absolutely be about play. Arguably, we’re so fed up with finding people via social media, that we’re now keen on recovering some anonymity.

Yet, be warned. Like many spaces online – including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many others – it is also populated by the pervasive – and often unwelcome – sexpectations of the user community. Just don’t start with saying ‘asl’

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International Journal of Technoethics (IJT)

An Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association New in 2010

Editor-in-Chief: Rocci Luppicini (AUTHOR), University of Ottawa, Canada

Published: Quarterly

Call for Papers:

The Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Technoethics (IJT)would like to invite you to consider submitting a manuscript for inclusion in this scholarly journal. The following describes the mission, coverage, and guidelines for submission to IJT.

Mission

The mission of the International Journal of Technoethics (IJT) is to evolve technological relationships of humans with a focus on ethical implications for human life, social norms and values, education, work, politics, law, and ecological impact. This journal provides cutting-edge analysis of technological innovations, research, developments policies, theories, and methodologies related to ethical aspects of technology in society.IJT publishes empirical research, theoretical studies, innovative methodologies, practical applications, case studies, and book reviews. IJT encourages submissions from philosophers, researchers, social theorists, ethicists, historians, practitioners, and technologists from all areas of human activity affected by advancing technology.

Coverage

Topics to be discussed in this journal include (but are not limited to) the following:

# Biotech ethics

o Cloning ethics

o E-health ethics

o Genetic ethics

o Medical

o Neuroethics

o Research ethics

o Sport and nutrition technoethics

o Telemedicine ethics

# Computer and engineering ethics

o Environmental technoethics

o Military technoethics

o Nanoethics

o Nuclear ethics

o Professional codes of ethics

# Educational technothics

o Cyber-bullying

o Cyber democracy

o Digital divide

o E-learning ethics

o Emancipatory educational technology

o Professional technoethics

o Technoethical assessment and evaluation

# Information and communication technoethics

o Cyberethics

o Cyber pornography

o Cybercrime

o Cyber-stalking

o Internet ethics

o Media ethics

o Netiquette

# Organizational technoethics

o E-business ethics

o Global ethics

o Outsourcing ethics

o Technoethics and knowledge management

o Technoethics and work

o Virtual organization ethics

# Technoethics and cognition

o Artificial morality

o Ethical agents

o Technoethical systems

o Technoethical mind

o Techno-addiction and ethical intervention

# Technoethics and society

o Digital property ethics

o Global technoethics

o Technoethics and art

o Technoethics and law

o Technoethics and science

o Technoethics and social theory

Submission

Prospective authors should note that only original and previously unpublished articles will be considered. Interested authors must consult the journal’s guidelines for manuscript submissions at http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/guide.asp prior to submission. All article submissions will be forwarded to at least 3 members of the Editorial Review Board of the journal for double-blind, peer review. Final decision regarding acceptance/revision/rejection will be based on the reviews received from the reviewers. All submissions must be forwarded electronically.

All submissions and inquiries should be directed to the attention of:

Rocci Luppicini

Editor-in-Chief

International Journal of Technoethics

Email: rluppici@uottawa.ca

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Responses from their peers have varied, but there seems to be three primary modes of reading the performative act of tweeting. It’s either tweeted treated as advocacy ie. I’ve heard about something and, since I support it, I’m going to share it. Alternatively, it can be seen as a news service to something others may not find easily ie. I’ve heard about something you might not learn about through your own media sources, so I’m going to send it to you all as I think you should be aware of it, regardless of your position. A third option may be the vanity tweet ie. I’ve heard about something and if I share it with you, you’ll think higher of me.

Now, I’m not saying that all tweets are like this. Of course, some tweets are to friends and function rather like instant messaging as a chat device. However, I wonder if all re-tweets might be characterized by these three categories. The challenge, of course, is that readers cannot know for sure which act is being undertaken. So, when we tweet, perhaps twitter need to permit users to categorize the tweet as one of the three (or more).

Discuss.

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