Is It Time For a Flex Plan?

He supports the idea of choosing goals. They could be "protecting athletes' health, making a sport more fun to play or watch, preserving valued traditions, setting salutary examples for the youth, or probing the limits of human performance -- with or without enhancements."

But then comes the sticky problem of how you accomplish this, as a practical matter, given our past and current failures. Bostrom comes down on the side of multiple leagues. "It is unlikely that one size will fit all. Just as we divide many sports into weight, age or sex classes, we might have different versions of the same sport that are more or less tolerant of doping."

This is wrongheaded, says Leon R. Kass, the renowned and highly literate scourge of human enhancement. He would draw the line in an entirely different place, one he says we crossed decades ago.

The avid White Sox fan acknowledges, "It is not obvious how biological enhancement differs from all these other ways they can improve their performance -- special shoes, lighter bats, better trainers."

The University of Chicago and Harvard-trained bioethicist is the former chairman and current member of the President's Council on Bioethics. In "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness," he attacks modern sports' decades-old dilemma:

"The ironies of biotechnological enhancement of athletic performance should now be painfully clear. . . . We are choosing to become less than normally the source or the shapers of our own identity. . . . We take a pill or insert a gene that makes us into something we desire, yet only by seeming to compromise the self-directed path toward its attainment. . . .

"By using these agents to transform our bodies for the sake of better bodily performance, we mock the very excellence of our own individual embodiment that superior performance is meant to display."

Kass would take it back to the original ideals of the modern Olympics -- "the deed beautifully done, rather than a detachable performance that lives primarily as a gray statistic," as he puts it. He points to Roger Bannister, whom he knew slightly -- the breaker of the four-minute mile. "He did this by running on his lunch break with some of his friends. It was the idealization of the amateur. This was before sports became a really huge business."

How would he enforce a return to generations-old rules?

Shame.

"I think there is still a chance, at least in Major League Baseball, that the culture of the undoctored athlete could be reasserted by the players themselves, by simply shaming their teammates who are in a way betraying the game.

"What is shame? Shame is the experience that we feel when we are caught out in our actions that show the gap between what we would like to be and what we are. That's the way stigma and social shame work."

As human enhancement advances exponentially, it may seem odd that these issues showed up early on our sports pages. But it should not. Technology is usually first adopted wherever you see the most competition -- where small advances can have big consequences. That's why the other big arena in which human enhancement is being pursued most aggressively is the military.

That's why questions of what it means to be human could really explode if something dramatic were to occur in a sports venue. Suppose, for example, that in the 2008 Olympics, some athletes walk out with necks wider than their heads, and haunches like steers, and world records that normally are only broken by a tenth of a second start being broken by 20 seconds or more? Suppose these athletes pass their drug tests with flying colors, because the technologies they're employing are not drugs? Would that be a shock on the order of Sputnik, producing comparable fundamental reordering of society's priorities?

This is not to predict that such a thing will happen. It is simply to report that such technology -- known as "gene-doping" -- has existed in lab animals for years. At Johns Hopkins, in mice, it has yielded 61 percent increases in muscle mass with two treatments.

Another researcher, H. Lee Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania, says that scarcely a day goes by that his lab doesn't get a call from an athlete or a coach interested in using gene-doping on humans.

So what are the rules?