Of Mice and Everest

Want to know how important it is for the World Anti-Doping Agency to develop a blood test to detect athletes who have illegally boosted their bloodstreams' capacities for transmitting oxygen (just one of the myriad ways they illicitly improve their performances)? Important enough to send a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers to the top of Mt. Everest with a cage of mice in their backpacks.

Gabriel Willman and Tejvir Khurana, two scientists at Penn recently made it almost to the summit of Mt. Everest with their mice in tow as part of their fascinating experiment to gauge the effects of the actual experience of high altitude on mice. They will compare the blood of mice who made the Everest climb with that of those who were exposed to "artificial" means of experiencing high altitude. This includes exposure to drugs, low-oxygen chambers and even genetic manipulation, techniques that have become increasingly popular with athletes.

Living at high altitudes has been shown to increase the body's number of red blood cells which leads to increased oxygenation capacity. Apparently no one seems to mind if athletes decide to move to higher ground to gain an edge on their competition. After all, this is a "natural" means of training and it is probably no coincidence that the US Olympic training camp is in Colorado Springs. But it is when the athletes try to duplicate these conditions artificially that strikes Khurana, an athlete himself, as unfair and potentially harmful. "For me, it's a very black-and-white issue that the playing field should be level," he told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

One way that athletes have tried to mimic higher altitudes is with something called low-oxygen tents and it remains to be seen whether or not they are as effective as the real thing. One of the things Khurana and Willman will be testing for is whether or not they can tell the difference between the blood of mice who have actually been at high altitudes and those who have tried to mimic the experience using a low-oxygen tent. The hope to have the answers in a few months.

The Everest expedition was not the first time that Khurana and Willman have climbed with mice. Last year they did experiments with fruit flies on top of Mount McKinley and in 2005 they took mice halfway up Mount Marmolejo in the Andes to study the effects of low oxygen levels on muscle function.

The lengths that science is willing to go to "level the playing field" is only as astounding as the lengths that athletes are willing to go to boost their performances. To think that scientists have to nearly summit Mt. Everest to keep abreast of the latest "doping" techniques is an indication that something is terribly wrong with the incentives that provoke world class athletes to break the rules in the first place.

And of course I'm wondering if we are suddenly going to see a stampede of horse trainers moving their operations to high altitudes...