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1 Stud. Ethics L. & Tech. 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/selt1 and id is 1 raw text is: King and Robeson: Athlete or Guinea Pig? Sports and Enhancement Research Introduction Bioethics has paid little attention to the issues raised by health and medical care in athletic competition. The single exception concerns cheating and the use of prohibited performance enhancements, such as steroids and gene doping (see, e.g., Miah 2004; Mehlman 2004; Murray 1984, 1983; Savulescu, Foddy, and Clayton 2004). A separate bioethics literature has developed on enhancements, primarily genetic interventions and assisted reproduction; it focuses on examining (or challenging) the distinction between enhancement and treatment (e.g., Juengst 1997) and on defining and assessing the moral and societal acceptability of enhancements (e.g., Buchanan et al. 2000; President's Council on Bioethics 2003; Parens 1998; Kennedy Institute ofEthics Journal 2005). Our concern in this essay is different. We address a critical and neglected issue: how innovations in performance enhancement are introduced in competitive athletics. We consider innovations in the enhancement of athletic performance to constitute enhancement research, and believe that athletes are often unwitting or unwilling research subjects. Examining enhancement research in competitive athletics raises important questions about the relationship between treatment, prevention, and enhancement, provides a useful framework for considering the ethical issues that arise in conducting research on enhancements, and could foster a broader examination of the relationship between human enhancement and human flourishing. Familiar problems in research ethics, such as vulnerability, undue influence, full disclosure, and equitable subject selection, take on particular significance when athletes are the subjects. If introducing an enhancement into an athlete's regimen or body amounts to unregulated clinical research, the following issues merit examination: (1) situational pressures and constraints on decisionmaking at both individual and institutional levels, which are especially significant in team sports; (2) information disclosure and conflict of interest on the part of health care professionals working in competitive athletics; and (3) voluntariness and vulnerability on the part of athletes who are serving as research subjects, especially at the amateur level but also among professionals. Sorting through these issues in the context of athletic competition is especially challenging, due in no small measure to the need to consider not only questions raised by the individual issues, but the reality that they rarely, if ever, appear singly. 1

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