Brain stimulation technology being used in elite athletics | Hacker News Reader

Brain stimulation technology being used in elite athletics

spectrum.ieee.org

18 pointsjtr111 comments

Let's stretch the imagination and presume this hyperbole is true, if so, it would be nothing more than the moral equal of doping.

Towards the bottom, it mentions that the World Anti-Doping Agency is monitoring it:

if tDCS’s benefits are verified, WADA will judge the technology on two other criteria: whether it risks the health of the athlete, and whether it violates “the spirit of sport.” A positive finding in either category is grounds for a ban.

This might be pseudoscience however what will happen when crispr/cas9 gets off the ground?

You can modify selected DNA segments in selected cells this is going to be pretty much untraceable.

One can inject them selves with some serum that improves lactic acid resistance or w/e and there will be no way to detect it.

Since some athletic governing bodies have already gone down the rabbit hole of telling women athletes that they need to have body parts removed ("in order to normalize testosterone levels"), I suspect that if your genes are too good, you'll be suspected of having modified them, and therefore banned.

That's a completely different case with a lot of unclear things. The Olympic commission did run genetic and sex tests on her and the results were not published. It looks like there is some genetic anomalies however as the results are secret and she will not publish them on her own it's hard to know if she is indeed intersex or not.

Males and Female are intentionally segregated in sports because it would be utterly unfair for them to compete on against each other. Check virtually every sport and you'll see that the slowest scores in almost every event for men beat the record for the respective women's event.

You simply can't allow cross gender whether it's transgender or intersex individuals to choose under which gender they would compete, oddly enough it would be harmful to women if intersex and transgender athletes could compete in women's events.

I'm all up for having a 3rd or even 4th gender events set up if there is a sufficiently large pool of athletes to compete in these events.

No, it's not "a completely different case". It's going to come down to (surprise!) genetic testing. My comment specifically addresses a possible scenario when the Olympic commission can't identify whether or not someone has had outside assistance in their performance. Just like they did here, I'm guessing they'll err on the side of caution and forbid that person from competing.

You can theoretically test for the vectors and byproducts used to insert the DNA segments.

Also it seems like you could theoretically sequence an athlete as a baseline and then compare future segments to their original DNA.

There are virtually no byproducts to test. And there is nothing to sequence you can improve your lung tissue only, your artery or heart or a specific muscle. CRISPR is very selective just taking a swab or a blood sample and testing it would reveal nothing. Also doing a full sequence for each athlete is going to be very expensive not to mention that this only works when they start professionally competing you can dope your kid at a young age and there is no baseline to compare it too.

Musicians ought to be interested too.

snake oil.

It's obviously not working with Ryan Lochte

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