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Muscular baby: a new Pandora's box?

There’s a story in today’s New York Times about a muscular baby. (link to story)

It seems that the baby’s mother is a professional sprinter in the 100 meter dash, and her grandfather, a construction worker, was able to unload 330 pound curbstones by hand. The mother has one gene with a mutation that blocks the production of a chemical called myostatin. The baby has two copies of this gene. The unidentified father must also have a copy of the mutated gene (otherwise how else would the baby get two copies).

The spin in the New York Times and on CNBC (yes, the story was on CNBC this afternoon) is that this will lead scientists to develop ways to fight muscular dystrophy and other muscle-wasting diseases such as AIDS.

But all I see is the dark side of this story. First of all, the kid (who is four years old) may have health problems when he gets older due to his unnatural lack of myostatin. For example, some think that his heart muscles will grow too big and he’ll wind up dying from heart failure at an early age.

Beyond that, there’s the Pandora’s box created if a new muscle-enhancing drug is developed. Maybe it will help people with muscular dystrophy, but healthy people will want to take it to improve their athletic performance, or just because of the cosmetic benefits of having big muscles.

There has been a lot of interesting discussion at Slashdot. If bigger muscles are so great, why don’t people already have them? It was suggested that big muscles don’t create a survival advantage because the big muscles use up more calories, so the big muscled human would have to eat more food and wouldn’t be as good at surviving famines. The thin and wiry human would survive better in a primitive hunter/gatherer society.

The previous explanation suggests that there is no longer a disadvantage to having bigger muscles now that we live in a society with plenty of food for everyone. But there may be other health problems associated with bigger muscles. Whatever the health problems may be, there will be millions willing to suffer them in order to gain cosmetic and athletic benefits. Such is already the case with steroids.

Rance, whose blog may be a hoax, suggested that it’s pretty common for people in Hollywood to use steroids. It makes you wonder if the massive muscles seen on Brad Pitt in the movie Troy are natural. Watch a movie from the 1950s and see how skinny the men are compared to modern movies. Will myostatin blocking drugs create yet another chasm between those with access to these substances and the average man on the street?

This story also points out that the best athletes are not just regular people who have trained hard, but people who are blessed with genetics that allow them to excel in their sport. The mother was obviously a professional sprinter because of her muscle building gene. There is a certain sort of morality attached to being good at sports, that it’s a reward for hard training that other people are too lazy to engage in. But in reality being good at sports is just a combination of the right genes, combined with a natural human propensity to engage in activities we are good at.

There is additional blogosphere commentary about the muscular baby at Gene Expression.

posted Thursday, June 24, 2004