Enhanced Athletes? It’s Only Natural

We want athletes to break world records. We want them to remain extraordinary. So the increased use of human-enhancement technologies will become a necessity, perhaps even an obligation.

Here’s what it could look like: A swimmer, impossibly long arms swinging at his side, takes to the starting block. He has trained for this moment for months. Keeping up with the latest developments, he has endured surgical enhancements to enlarge the webbing in his fingers and toes. He’s wearing the ultimate in sharkskin swimsuit technology. He inhales deeply through nasal passages surgically widened to optimize his breathing efficiency—and dives in.

That’s not something we’ll see at the Beijing Olympics, of course. We’ll see speed and finesse, but then, behind the scenes, the new champions will be poked and prodded and thoroughly examined to make sure that they got to the podium by dint of pure brute strength and training prowess, not doping.

But maybe it’s time that our view of human enhancement changed…

Read the rest here.

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Andy Miah is an IEET Fellow, a Reader in New Media & Bioethics at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. He is author of Genetically Modified Athletes (2004) and is currently working on The Medicalisation of Cyberspace and CyberSport: Digital Games, Ethics & Cultures' (The MIT Press, 2007).