Super-Athletes Of The

Future
Hugh Herr lost both his legs in a rock-climbing accident when he was 17. Now he
plans to someday run faster than anyone ever has: on a pair of robotic legs.
Dont bet against him. Six months after losing his legs, Herr was rock-climbing
(1)............. as well as before on prosthetics he modified himself. Now an
associate professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, Herr designed the first robotic
knee ever to make it to marketits sold by Icelands Ossurand has just finished
up the first replacement ankle thats as strong as one (2)..... flesh and blood. It is
only a matter of time, he says, before amputee athletes can routinely run faster
and jump higher than Olympians.
Already, scientific advances may be driving the record books. Performanceenhancing drugs, including steroids for strength and EPO for endurance, are
(3).... in sports from cycling to baseball, with only draconian testing policies
keeping them at bay. What happens if they became an accepted part of sports?

In Pictures: The Making Of A Super-Athlete

Tufts University physicist Roger Tobin, who has tried to put some numbers on the
problem, says performance-enhancing drugs actually deliver less bang (4)....
dose than youd expect from a (5)...... small increase in strength. At the highest
levels of sport, its enough. It could be the difference between the bronze medal
and the gold, or the world record or not, he says.
Tobin estimated that over a career, a baseball player using steroids could up his
muscle mass by perhaps 10%. That would increase the speed (6).......... his bat
by 4%, and the speed of the ball by 3%. For the top batters in the game, that
tiny boost in power (7)....... the number of balls hit out of the park by 50% to
100%. Given the potential side effects of these chemicals, we dont want athletes
using them. However, its no surprise they do.
Steroids are just the beginning. A drug (8)..... tested by Wyeth for muscular
dystrophy blocks myostatin, a protein that prevents muscle from being created.
Animals that use these same compounds grow incredibly large muscles, as (9).....
an infant with a mutated version of the myostatin gene. Already, dietarysupplement companies have been selling algae-derived medicines they say do the
same thingwith no real evidence.
And a molecular switch inside cells called a peroxisome proliferator-activated
receptor (PPAR) delta is involved in unknown ways (10).... metabolism.
Marathon mice that have had the PPAR delta receptor altered through genetic
engineering can run (11) .........twice as long as their unmodified brothers and
sisters. Drugs that turn up PPAR delta are in testing for the treatment of diabetes,
but this has been a difficult area of drug development, because drugs to hit these
mysterious receptors often have side effects.
The ultimate shift will come if science learns how to directly edit an athletes DNA,
making him or her physically better without the need for drugs. (12)....., gene
therapy, which aims to do this using modified viruses and other technology, has
not panned out as a treatment. If it ever (13)....., it could make the jobs of antidoping associations far more difficult.

Replacement limbs that outperform real ones are far in the future, but (14).......
athletic associations are already worrying. Oscar Pistorius, a South African
double-amputee and champion sprinter, has been fighting to compete (15) ...
able-bodied athletes. But in July, the International Association of Athletics
Federations, which is the arbiter at track-and-field events, said it needs future
research to determine whether Pistorius, 21, has advantages as a result of his
prosthetic blades.
The running prosthetics being developed in Herrs lab dont really have to be
better than real legs, which need to be able to walk, climb and sit. They just need
to be able to run, and they dont need to be pretty either. Aimee Mullins, a double
amputee who became a National Collegiate Athletic Association sprinter, (16).... a
recent Media Lab conference that at one point she wanted normal legs, but then
she got the bug. I wanted this stuff that came out of NASA.
Herr wants to change the way people underestimate others who are different, and
perhaps overestimate themselves. Most people view the human as the center of
the universe in terms of form and function, he says. They take something as
basic as walking and running, and they have an amputee (17)..... pity and look
down on run faster than they do thats mind-changing. That change in mindset
about how people view others with different bodies is very important (18) ....
society.
That big change in mind-set could affect sports too. If human anatomy is no
longer the center of the universe, would it be (19) ..... fun to watch the athletes
who can jump higher? Sure, it seems unlikely that people will have their legs
replaced. But Herrs lab is also working on exoskeletons that can help people
carry 100 pounds (20) ..... assistance. Someday, they might also allow athletes
to traverse rough terrainHerr predicts people will throw out their mountain
bikes.
Imagine it: football games played on rocky mountainsides, or baseball with an
obstacle course in the middle of the field. A skilled athlete would still do better
than an unskilled one, but the exoskeletons would bring the game to an
undreamed-of level. Says Herr: Its going to be fun as hell.