Muscle Mice

SilasMortimer writes "Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have accomplished that for which humankind has been desperate since the dawn of civilization: turning sad, injured regular mice into angry, beefed-up super-mice. Well, okay, there's no official word in the article about the rodents' emotional states, but certainly when stem cells were injected into mice with leg injuries, the muscle grew back... almost twice as big as it was before the injury [abstract, supplemental material (PDF)]. This has many exciting implications, from better healing after injuries to slowing down the aging process to a spike in the number of cases of Generalized Anxiety Disorder among cats. I, for one, refuse to perpetuate outdated memes. (But feel free to make up for the lack.)" If these mice are bred with those given previously discovered treatments to make them smarter and fearless, we might be in trouble.

Re:Possible professional sports abuse?

[phantomfive]

The reason steroids are illegal in sports is because they are damaging to the health. People think you should be able to compete in events without doing weird, unhealthy stuff like that. A lot of performance enhancing substances are perfectly legal, and everyone does them, like powdered protein, or creatine. If you don't use protein, it's really depressing how many cans of tunafish you have to eat to make up for it. These are so unlikely to damage your health that anyone can use them without special help from a doctor, and without health problems.

There is a scale, and of course steroids of course are on the extreme end of the spectrum, and have a lot of negative health effects. Other things, like blood doping, is mostly safe, but still carries risks and is hard to do by yourself, so it is kind of in the middle. Diet drugs are in the middle, but are legal. Protein is on the safe side. If this new technique ends up on the safe side, it will be legal. If it ends up on the unsafe side, it will be illegal. If it ends up in the middle, other random factors will end up determining what side it ends up on.

I don't have the knowledge to comment on whether it will be easy to detect or not.