Gene Editing

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, it is impossible to follow that outstanding speech by the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I hope the House will forgive me if I focus on this subject as it applies to international sport.

It is interesting to reflect that 100 years ago in competitive sport the distinction was between the amateur and professional ranks. Today the focus is on the drug cheats who knowingly take banned performance-enhancing drugs to gain a competitive advantage. London was supposed to be the cleanest Games in history; statistically, they turned into the dirtiest. There were 116 failed tests at the London Olympics in 2012, beating the mark of 86 set in Beijing. Of those 116 athletes, 69 have subsequently been disqualified—more than triple the number caught doping at the 2004 Athens Olympics and, as your Lordships will know, only the dopey dopers are foolish enough to get caught during the height of the competitive season.

Thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, we have the opportunity in this debate to look to the future and focus on the next major challenge to clean competitive sport. The outlook is bleak, for the battle between sports cheats and testers is poised to enter a whole new era. The consequences of gene editing for performance enhancement in sport are real. That is why the World Anti-Doping Agency has extended its 2003 ban on gene doping to include all forms of gene editing. It already bans the use of genetically modified cells and gene therapy if they have

“the potential to enhance sport performance”.

The list also includes

“gene editing agents designed to alter genome sequences and/or the transcriptional or epigenetic regulation of gene expression”,

although, interestingly, the responsibility lies with the athlete, which is impossible if their gene editing eventually one day becomes somatic.

The field is advancing incredibly fast, in part due to the discovery in the Olympic year of London 2012 of an easier editing method, CRISPR, which has been referred to, and its subsequent sons and daughters. The challenge in global sport for the remaining years of the 21st century will move on to the consequences of fast-moving developments derived from gene editing, where genetically engineered athletes will be set against the untainted natural skills of the fastest, highest and strongest competitors on earth. At the heart of the debate will be therapeutic use, as opposed to performance enhancement, among athletes, as rightly referred to by the right reverend Prelate.

There will always be huge ethical hurdles to consider, as evidenced by the rogue Chinese scientist Dr He Jiankui, but for sure there will be others seeking to fill his research shoes and the possibility of hidden funding to attempt to create the perfect athlete, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, noted, will be impossible. However, it will not be impossible to create enhanced athletic performance.

My call for an outright ban on the application of this science in the world of competitive sport does not mean that I am blind to the potential of gene editing outside sport. However, I caution on the reality of further laboratory work in this context. Genes have a significant role to play in sporting performance, but they will never deliver sporting glory on their own. Without the balance of genetic advantage, environment, coaching and training, there will never be gold medal outcomes.

Take the example of the benefit of altitude training. As elite athletes acclimatise to high altitude, they acquire more red blood cells, which allow them to carry more oxygen. When they compete at lower altitudes, they get a natural boost to the muscles when additional oxygen is available. This blood-expanding effect can enhance performance by up to 2%. While that sounds like a tiny improvement, it can be the difference between missing selection and a gold-medal performance.

As evidenced by David Epstein in his seminal book The Sports Gene, the celebrated Mäntyranta—the multi-gold medallist in cross-country skiing in Finland—had a genetic trait which led to an extraordinary blood cell count, measured at up to 65% higher than that of the average man. It demonstrated that even trace quantities of EPO could bring major performance advantages. Subsequently, in all, 97 members of his family were examined, 29 of whom had remarkably high haemoglobin —many were champions in cross-country skiing. The geneticist Albert de la Chapelle discovered that, of the 7,138 pairs of bases that make up the EPO receptor gene, a single base was different in the 29 family members who had unusually high levels of haemoglobin. Each family member, like all human beings, had two copies of the EPOR gene. But at position 6,002 in only one copy of each affected family member’s two EPOR genes, there was an adenine molecule instead of a genuine molecule—a minuscule alteration, but the impact was immense. The production of red blood cells ran amok. Here was a mutation beneficial for an athlete, but otherwise of little consequence.

Of course, natural examples such as this are extremely rare, and applying that science in the laboratory and finding the athleticism genes is extraordinarily complex and difficult. However, it is attractive to those who wish to cheat in international sport to achieve glory. This is the road that will be travelled by rogue sports geneticists to cheat the system, which we must block through effective regulation and legislation, both domestically and through international co-operation, however great the challenge. David Epstein went on to say:

“A persistent inability to pinpoint most sports genes doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and scientists will, slowly, find more of them.”


One conclusion we can all reach is that, despite the uncertainty surrounding the potential application of gene editing to competitive sport, its potential is real. It should have no place in competitive sport. As I have made clear, in the 21st century, cheating by means of performance-enhancing drugs is an issue of today, and it is an issue of tomorrow for those geneticists who will go to any lengths to corrupt the athlete, and, sadly, many nation states in search of glory, in one of the few sectors where some countries can gain national pride. Gene editing clearly has huge benefits, such as relieving the burden of heritable diseases. However, it has no place in the sports arms race if we are to protect the integrity of competitive sport between clean athletes and rejoice in fair competition between young sports men and women worldwide.