Dr. Andy Miah has written what looks like will be a fascinating book coming out this year called "Genetically Modified Athletes: Biomedical Ethics, Gene Doping and Sport." I'll have more on this once I can review the book. It has a nice blurb from Francis Fukuyama who says that "our existing framework for dealing with the problem of sports doping is inadequate on both practical and ethical grounds." This is an ongoing theme of this site, so I look forward to getting the book.
March 12, 2004
Posted by Nick
I get annoyed at the "baseball-is-a-metaphor-for-life" school of thinking perhaps best expressed by George Will and other enthusiasts. I prefer anti-communist menace Stan Evans' take on baseball, that it's a metaphor for... softball.
Either way, Brother Arnold has a provocative argument about sports and biotech and metaphors:
Like Leon Kass, the Chairman of the Bioethics Council, [Michael] Sandel makes extensive use of sports metaphors. For instance, he writes, "as the role of enhancement increases, our admiration of the achievement fades -- or, rather, our admiration for the achievement shifts from the player to his pharmacist."
However, sports are a peculiar facet of human experience. They are inevitably zero-sum in character. For every winner, there is a loser. Each tournament has only one champion. When an athlete breaks a world record, the previous record-holder's title is eclipsed.
Is the same true of biotech? Is the metaphor legit? I report, you decide.
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