Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

The Swimsuit Arms Race

It looks like those high-tech swimsuits that have been breaking world records for the last couple of years might finally be banned.

Is that a good thing?

FINA, the world's swimming competition authority, has just begun to issue rulings on which suits can or can't be worn in races. The criteria are thickness, buoyancy, and permeability. Let's consider the arguments for regulation, as put forth this week in Agence France Presse and the New York Times.

Reason No. 1: They tilt the playing field. This is the standard metaphor for fairness in sports. Swimsuit regulation should put all athletes "on a level playing field," says one top racer.

This argument makes sense only because the new suits are expensive, costing hundreds of dollars. If the prices came down to where everyone could afford them, I don't see a problem. Nobody bans composite tennis racquets just because they're better than aluminum.

Reason No. 2: They cancel out talent gaps. The suits are "enabling athletes of lesser ability to compete on equal terms with the best-conditioned, hardest-working athletes in the sport. That is why the mandate for change was clear," a FINA executive tells the Times. A top swimmer complains: "A lot of old records that were really, really good are being taken down by people you never heard of."

This argument sounds confused. Why is it wrong to let swimmers of "lesser ability" compete "on equal terms"? Isn't that a way of leveling the playing field? Are the traditional top swimmers the "hardest-working" ones? Or are they just genetically lucky? And aren't the swimmers "you never heard of" the ones least likely to have the money for fancy suits? What's so righteous about freezing them out?

Reason No. 3: They change the sport. They "make a muscled and stocky body as streamlined as a long and lean one," the Times observes. "With the body riding high on the water like a racing hull, it changes a swimmer's relationship with the water, influencing everything from how vigorously the swimmer has to kick to the rhythm of the stroke."

So what? Metal and composite racquets did the same thing to tennis. Pads have changed who can play football. Equipment alters the body requirements for sports all the time. Often, in retrospect, we like the change, in part because it opens the game to a wider range of people.

Reason No. 4: They're consuming the sport. "In 2008, an unprecedented 108 world records were set, the majority by athletes wearing the [LZR] suit made by Speedo," the Times notes. This year, "18 world records have been broken by swimmers wearing suits with fewer panels and seams and more polyurethane" than the LZR. Last year, Speedo was the big story, but by the latest count, "22 manufacturers ... have entered the swimsuit race."

To me, this is the most powerful argument for cracking down. It's no longer a question of helping everyone buy the 2008 LZR, as I naively proposed last year. As the Associated Press notes, that suit has already "been outstripped by polyurethane models." The decisive race today isn't between the swimmers; it's between those 22 manufacturers. When the engineers are overshadowing the swimmers, the sport isn't just changing. It's disappearing.

"It's the athlete that is making the difference. The suit is not breaking the records," one swimmer tells AFP. But that's not true. The new suits are turning the same athletes from losers into winners:

[Rafael] Muñoz, a 21-year-old Spaniard, did not advance past the preliminary heats in the 100 butterfly at the Olympics in August, but this year ... [h]e has lowered his time from Beijing more than two seconds, to 50.46, which is two-hundredths faster than what Michael Phelps swam in winning the gold. Then there is the 24-year-old Brazilian Henrique Barbosa, who finished seventh in his preliminary heat in the Olympics in the 100-meter breaststroke in 1:01.11. Nine months later, with his hulking 6-foot-4 frame wedged into one of the new suits, he posted the fastest time in the world this year, a 59.03.

This is a controlled experiment: The same athletes, with less than a year to improve their conditioning, are cutting their times precipitously, thanks to innovations in suit technology.

If you want to pick a good suit and put everybody in it, fine. But we can't have an ongoing arms race among manufacturers that determines all the records and who sets them.

A-Rod and the Invisible Steroids

Maybe Rodriguez never doped until the testing program began, and he was caught the first time he tried it. Maybe he was tipped just that one time and just as an innocent favor. Maybe it's pure coincidence that he chose Primobolan. Maybe the state of the art hasn't advanced, and every player on steroids is being caught. Maybe no other lists of failed test results have been destroyed, concealed, or legally suppressed.

And if you believe that, I've got a $275 million slugger to sell you.

More here.

Following Suit

Maybe you can ban steroids in sports because they're medically dangerous. And maybe you can ban carbon-fiber prosthetic legs because they're newfangled. But what about swimsuits? What do you do when a technology that's been around for ages—sleeker, tighter suits—becomes decisive? What can you say when the only objection to such technology is that most people can't afford it?

That's the situation today in collegiate and high-school swimming, according to Amy Shipley's enlightening report in Sunday's Washington Post. Swimmers wearing Speedo's LZR suits set 71 of the 77 new aquatic racing world records at, or just before, this year's Olympics. Now collegiate swimming programs are buying LZRs, and their competitors feel obliged to, um, follow suit. The trend extends to the high-school level, where the suits are showing up at state championship meets. Problem: LZRs cost around $500 retail. At best, with discounts, they go for about half that. And because of the fancy fabric, they wear out after just a few meets. Bottom line: Swimmers who can afford these suits will beat equally talented swimmers who can't.

Athletic federations are divided over what to do. Two months ago, USA Swimming prohibited kids under 13 from competing in the suits. The NCAA imposed a moratorium on the suits but then withdrew it.

In general, I don't like sports equipment bans based on sheer cost. Composite tennis racquets were pricey when they first came out. Should they have been prohibited? What about golf clubs or bike frames? Innovative materials are usually expensive at the outset. The way they become cheaper is by gaining notice, spreading to a broader market, and being produced more efficiently in subsequent iterations. If you ban them, you block this process.

In the swimsuit case, it looks to me as though a logical compromise is already unfolding. What makes the suit prohibitively expensive isn't just the outlay, but the fact that it wears out so fast. The crucial number is the per-meet cost. And that number can be sharply reduced by using the suits only at championship events late in the season. This is exactly what some college programs are already doing. You don't need a Ferrari to pick up your groceries. Swim your regular meets in cheaper suits, and save your LZRs for the big events.

This policy coincides with Speedo's discount strategy. The company says it offers LZR discounts to sponsoring colleges. At conference championships, the discount is 40 percent. At the NCAA championships, it's 65 percent. The higher you go in competition, the more the suit matters, and the more worthwhile it is for the company to put you in its suit.

Don't ban the LZR. The unfairness at issue is cost, and cost is adjustable. Let's see how the players adjust before the supervisors go in with a heavy hand.

The Future as We Don't Know It

I just got back from a talk by David Friedman at the Cato Institute. Fascinating guy, thinks a mile a minute. He must have spat out 100 provocative ideas in his half an hour or so. I can draw you a mental picture of him pretty quickly: bubbly, balding, not much over five feet tall, wears a backpack over his tweed jacket (did I mention the "recreational medievalism"?) and asked the audience whether anybody could give him a ride to Charlottesville tonight. There's still time--if you're going from D.C. to Charlottesville, try him at DDFr@DavidDFriedman.com.

Friedman touched on a range of topics covered in his new book, Future Imperfect. I haven't read the book yet, but he gave a pretty good sense of it. Here's the Cato summary (the podcast will be up later):

[Friedman] looks at a variety of technological revolutions that might happen over the next few decades, their implications, and how to deal with them. Topics range from encryption and surveillance through biotechnology and nanotechnology to life extension, mind drugs, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. One theme of the book is that the future is radically uncertain. Technological changes already begun could lead to more or less privacy than we have ever known, freedom or slavery, effective immortality or the elimination of our species, and radical changes in life, marriage, law, medicine, work, and play. "If it can be done, it will be done," David Friedman has said. "So the interesting thing to me is not what should you stop but how do you adapt." We do not know which future will arrive, but it is unlikely to be much like the past.

In short, the book covers nearly everything Human Nature covers but with a libertarian bent. Which is sort of my bent, too, except that I'm less theoretically confident than Friedman is--or, to put it the other way, I'm more daunted by practical developments. Three years ago, for example, I wrote a series based on the idea that scientists would try to grow embryos beyond the conventional two-week limit, raising icky possibilities. The scenario made sense to me at the time, but in the three years since, it hasn't happened. A theorist would say, well, it'll happen eventually. I'm not so sure. My reaction is: Maybe I was just wrong.

So this is what I asked Friedman: Is there a contradiction between his technological optimism and his premise of radical uncertainty? When I say optimism, I don't mean a belief that technology will be good; I mean a belief that it will work. His talk was full of bold scenarios: conquering aging, developing artificial intelligence 100 times smarter than us in the next 30 years, and administering mind-control drugs that induce credulity. I agree that these scenarios are fascinating, and when I first came into this field, I took them very seriously. But everywhere I look, the news is telling me another story. The story is that in many fields, and in biology in particular, causality is turning out to be way more complex than we anticipated. The immediate manifestation of that complexity is that even our most conventional attempts to manipulate biology are producing unexpected and often decisive ill side effects.

Take the most obvious case: drugs. Friedman talked about three classes of mind drugs: those for pleasure, those for performance, and those for controlling other people. I've been to visionary or bioethics conferences where theorists have talked up these drugs and how cool or scary they'll become in the near future. But look at the news: Drugs are being restricted or pulled off the market because they're inducing ugly side effects. Not just drugs for the body, like Vioxx, but drugs for the mind, like Chantix. Steroids are boosting athletic performance but causing violence and circulatory trouble. Marijuana is being linked to heart attacks, brain shrinkage, and psychosis. I had high hopes for Bremelanotide, a new sexual-dysfunction drug, aka aphrodisiac. But last year its developer, Palatin Technologies, had to abandon that project due to "blood pressure increases" in some study participants. The company now touts the drug for "organ protection." It's turning out to be very hard to tinker with one function of the mind or body without affecting others.

Friedman's reply to all this was that we do better off "on net" by encouraging biotechnology than by limiting it, and that proposals to restrict it should be subject to the same skepticism that we might apply to the technology itself. That makes sense to me. Still, it's just a political answer. It doesn't address the underlying question of how soon--or even whether--biotechnology will achieve its promises.

I agree with Friedman that the future is radically uncertain. Too uncertain, in fact, to count on its arrival in the form that he envisions--or I do--anytime soon.

White-Collar Steroids

Are people in your office using performance-enhancing drugs?

I'm not talking about steroids. I'm talking about brain enhancers, such as Ritalin for concentration and Provigil for sleep reduction. Two months ago, I wrote about a Nature survey in which 20 percent of a self-selected sample of scientists, academics, and journalists admitted using such drugs "for non-medical reasons to improve my concentration, focus and memory." In absolute terms, it's hard to argue against these neuroenhancers. But in relative terms, freedom of enhancement can become coercive. If your officemates are outworking you by popping pills, can you afford not to join them?

We know this is a problem in sports. Has it become a problem in the white-collar workplace? Neil Munro examines this question in a recent issue of National Journal. The answer seems to be: We don't yet know, but signs point to trouble ahead.

Munro goes through what little we know. First, there's the non-random Nature poll. Then there's a survey at one college in which one of every six students admitted to taking prescription drugs as a study aid. Munro also cites the recent doubling of adult prescriptions for Adderall and Ritalin, implying that the increase is too big and fast to be purely therapeutic. But the really interesting comment comes from Zack Lynch, the executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization:

If you're GE Capital and you have offices in 154 financial centers around the planet, and these [brain-drug] tools are available in Dubai, and your workers there are trading more effectively, 5 to 10 percent better—they'll have a neuro-competitive advantage over workers where these tools are not legalized.

Neuro-competitive advantage. There's the leverage point for pushing brain boosters into the workplace. The good news is, these pills might make you more productive. The bad news is, if you don't take them, some guy in Dubai will, and he'll eat your job. Lynch flatly tells Munro that if the United States restricts performance-enhancing office drugs, "companies will shift their work offshore."

I don't want to make this scenario sound like it'll be here tomorrow. The brain is notoriously finicky, so there are a lot of obstacles and side effects to work out. But the same is true of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and that hasn't stopped them from becoming a coercive presence.

Munro points out that neuroenhancement is a big emerging market and that one firm has already been caught exploiting it:

Cephalon, a large biopharmaceutical company, agreed to pay a $425 million settlement to the federal government last year after the firm's sales force was accused of marketing its Provigil anti-sleep drug for purposes other than those for which it has been approved. Provigil was approved for treating narcolepsy, but it was used as a stimulant by some of the scientists who responded to the Nature poll.

Next time you're chatting with your colleagues around the water cooler, ask what they're taking with their water.