Gene doping may be possible for lifestyle enhancement

Modern understanding of genetics and cellular processes, as well as new technologies in pharmacology and diagnostics, have dramatically expanded the possibilities for altering physical performance. Huge breakthroughs in the field of CRISPR/Cas technology will become increasingly significant in the next few years. As a result, sport will be confronted with new ethical dilemmas. Even when human germ lines are modified, there is no shrinking, according to the most current results in this field. Despite the fact that the WADA definition of gene doping only covers a portion of the alternatives, the term gene doping is frequently used in the media as a euphemism for these realities.New issues will surface on a societal level. The technologies, pills, and procedures mentioned above should not just be used to treat diseases, but also as "lifestyle drugs" for healthy people who want to improve their performance or look better. As a result, the lines between therapy, enhancement, and doping are blurring more and more. This is especially true when it comes to doping in well-known sports.

Neither Licit nor Illicit

Cognition enhancers—drugs used to enhance cognition in healthy people—have generated a substantial amount of debate in the academic literature. In these debates, cognition enhancers are considered to promise (or threaten) to drastically change society. Cognition enhancers, as a “new breed of drugs,” are significant as they disrupt the licit–illicit binary maintained in the moral logic of pharmaceutical legitimacy. Cognition enhancers, despite putatively going beyond the legitimate purpose of restoring health, are not considered illicit. Their specificity positions them differently from medical, recreational, and other enhancement or “lifestyle” drugs, such that they elicit different rationales of governance. Utilizing a discursive analysis of the debates concerning cognition enhancers, I demonstrate how cognition enhancers cannot be determined by fixed properties either internal or external to themselves, but are rendered (reasonably) coherent through the problematizations that they produce. Questions of the boundaries of treatment and enhancement, equality and fairness, authenticity and autonomy, are bound up with concerns over the nature of being human. The discourse on cognition enhancers is underpinned by the assumption that these drugs do not repair a disorder but rather enhance an already “healthy” subject to an idealized subject, a construct underpinned by conceptions of a “normal” subject that is White, heteromasculine, and nondisabled. This presumption exists in the hinterlands that constitute these drugs as “cognition enhancers.”