THERE IS MUCH to consider before the 2012 Olympics. Stadiums to erect, roads to build, surly teenagers to train. And, of course, the pressing but neglected issue of whether competitive sport as we know it will exist in six years’ time.

For, while we fixate on whether the games will promote social inclusion, scientists are busy concocting new potions that can turn sportsmen into champions, thus blurring the frontiers of sporting achievement.

This month, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Johns Hopkins University report the astounding effects of a new chemical for increasing muscle mass in mice. Twice-weekly injections of ACVR2B prompted the mice’s muscles to grow by 60 per cent.

Professor Se-Jin Lee, who led the work, called the results “very dramatic”, adding: “Its effects were larger and faster than we’ve seen with any other agent.” The chemical blocks the action of myostatin, the protein that puts the brakes on muscle growth.

This project, and others like it, is intended to help the diseased, not enhance the healthy (the beefy mice are pointers to potential cures for muscular dystrophy, the muscle-wasting disease). But ever since news of so-called “mighty mice” surfaced several years ago, there have been reports of athletes seeking technologies that may give them a competitive edge. Instead of altitude training, why not modify the genes that produce oxygen-carrying cells? If the result of both techniques is the same, why should only one of them — genetic manipulation — be proscribed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)?

Science has become so pervasive in sport, argues Andy Miah, a bioethicist at the University of Paisley, that we should view genetic modification (GM) as just another performance- improving technology. “What, with training methods, nutritional supplements and specialised equipment, the contemporary elite athlete is already inherently technological,” Dr Miah says. “GM is only cheating insofar as it’s banned by the WADA. But should it be?” Despite the ban, GM athletes are expected to make their first appearance — covertly — at Beijing in 2008.

Dr Miah forecasts that, since the public expects its heroes to do everything possible to boost performance, it might one day balk at those who reject GM. “We might even say: ‘If you’re not genetically modified, don’t bother turning up to compete.’ It’s a bit like saying: ‘If you don’t train six days a week, don’t bother turning up,’ ” he argues.

Nor, Dr Miah says, should we worry about GM techniques giving an unfair advantage; that advantage exists already, with some athletes enjoying better facilities and expertise than others. Prohibiting GM techniques will probably send athletes underground in a quest for enhancement. Regulation, he says, is preferable to criminalisation.

Most worrying, he says in the magazine Science & Public Affairs, is the absence of debate about science in sport. WADA, he intimates, is laying down the law unchallenged. “We can’t have this top-down approach, with one institution determining how we should live.

“The agency should be made more accountable to national ethical committees, and Britain could have a leading role to play in this debate in the run-up to 2012.”

• RUMOURS are circulating on the internet that Iraqi insurgents are using chemical weapons — on themselves. The rumours centre on a compound known variously as BZ or Agent Buzz (real name 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate), a powerful hallucinogen that reportedly creates extreme aggression.

  According to the website Defense Tech, Agent Buzz, which can be delivered in an aerosol cloud, was tested between 1959 to 1975 on nearly 3,000 American soldiers. Its physical effects include increased heart rate, pupil dilation, blurred vision, dry skin and mouth, raised temperature, skin flushes and agitation (summarised in the medical adage: “Dry as a bone, blind as a bat, red as a beet, hot as a hare, and mad as a hatter.”). Larger doses can paralyse the nervous system and kill.

  The US Army, the website reports, destroyed its stockpile of the drug in 1990. Military experts, it seems, are divided about whether BZ — or a similar chemical called Agent 15 — was being manufactured in Iraq before the war.

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