Elective-enhancement surgery
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To date, baseball pitchers have opted for the surgery only after suffering ligament damage, but elective-enhancement surgery is getting inevitable. And it will show up in other sports as well. In fact, some players have already undergone laser eye surgery as it has been shown that "players coming off eye surgery are likely to see substantial improvements in batting average and power."
But if sports object to using a pill or a cream that changes body's chemistry, it should be a graver offense to reshape your cornea or reengineer tendon and bone structure. "We're only now starting to understand kinematics and mobility. In the next five to ten years, we're really going to understand how, say, the knee works in all three dimensions," explains Freddie Fu, surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh. In a decade, a quarterback might have muscle cells removed from his legs. Those cells would be engineered in the lab to be stronger and reinserted, enabling a 35-year-old quarterback to run like he's 20. The same technique could be used around shoulder joints, adding power and durability to the arms of pitchers, weight lifters, and volleyball players. As minimally invasive and arthroscopic techniques improve, surgeons will be able to tweak bicyclists' hearts to increase stroke volume and reroute digestive systems to optimize energy absorption. Medical ethicists are already starting to worry about the implications. Baseball has the excuse that surgery isn't prohibited, and steroids are. But as the science of physical enhancement progresses, that distinction will become difficult to justify. Via Wired. |
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in 1984, Freddie Fu rebuilt my elbow after a concussive fracture of the radial head (in the elbow joint) following a fall from my bike. One of his colleagues, Christopher Harner, rebuilt my knee in 1990 after an ACL tear playing ultimate frisbee. The elbow surgery involved removing broken parts, with no reconstruction possible, while the knee surgery included the transplantation of cadaverous "spare parts" (that is, a dead guy donated a ligament that s/he no longer needed).
The differences in the two surguries over a decade is remarkable, and what they are doing a decade after my reconstruction is just as amazing. My Mother also had reconstructive knee surgery in the 1970's, and I can only imagine the advances since then (and I thank the gods that mine came when they did, instead of earlier).
I for one am both terrified (read David Brin's The Postman) and enthralled with the potential that Fu describes. Oh brave new world, that has such peoples in it! (William Shakespeare, for those of you that think the quote comes from Aldous Huxley). Like it or not, yesterday's hopes and fears are almost always today's realities)
I like the idea of sports of the future being determined by which country has the best technology. Maybe then I would be interested in sports.
Let's take bets on the first year that China wins every single sporting event. I'll put 700 yuan on 2018.
I'm a senior in high school and doing a research paper for my Senior One Requirement. If anyone could inform me more on the enhancement surgery for baseball pitchers (since it is relatively new, at least to me) it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.