StarTalk Radio - Making a Phenom: Genetics

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

In Part One of our Making a Phenom mini-series, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice explore sports genetics alongside investigative reporter and author David Epstein and Stuart Kim, PhD, Founder and CEO of AxGen. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Image Credit: Unknown author – Public domain. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to talk more about genetics. Is there a sports gene? Do genes matter at all? Can you just be great? Or do genes make that happen within you? Of course, I've got my co-host, Chuck. Nice, Chuck. Hey, hey, hey, Neil. Yes. All right. Really good comedian. And I guess I call you an actor now. You're acting and stuff. Well, yeah. I right, really good comedian. And do I get to call you an actor now?

You're acting and stuff? Well, yeah. I mean, I've always, you know, I've been acting. Don't you've always. I've been acting like a comedian for God knows how long. My longtime co-host for StarTalk. And we've got Gary O'Reilly. Gary. Hey, Neil.

All right, you're a former soccer pro and a sports commentator. And we've got you now. Today we're beginning a four-part sort of mini-subseries of StarTalk Sports Edition that we're calling The Making of a Phenom. What does that require? What combination of training? Did you drink milk as a child? Is there any, what are the secrets?

So, Gary, I think you primarily thought up this miniseries of StarTalk Sports Editions. So, what did you have in mind for it? I want the hows, the whys, and is this guy for real reasons

behind the making and breaking of a phenom. Okay, now, none of us, the three of us don't have the particular expertise in this. We could like, you know, chew the fat on it, but we really got to bring in experts and that's part of StarTalk's hallmark. And so for this episode, we've got David Epstein. David, welcome to StarTalk Sports Edition. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, so you're a science writer and you write about sports. I love when science people apply their science knowledge to other disciplines. And this is great. And you wrote a book, The Sports Gene, Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. So that's why we've got you on this. That was published a few years ago. Who was the publisher of that?

It was a division of Penguin Random House called Current. Nice, nice. And you've also written and reported for ProPublica and Sports Illustrated. All right, very cool. Maybe we can ask about the cover effect that we've all heard about. Fair enough. Athletes get. So how did you end up covering sports genetics? So I was a grad student in geological science.

I was actually living in a tent in the Arctic when I decided to become a writer. And I had been a national level runner and had a training partner who actually dropped dead at the end of a race. I was a half miler and he was he was one of the top ranked guys in the country in his age group. You know, to make an immigrant first in his family, he was going to go to college and all these things. And I was devastated by it. And what was his age group? 80?

No, that's why if it had been 80, I wouldn't have been so surprised by it. Right. So, and eventually I had his family sign a waiver, allowing me to get up his medical record, sort of investigated what happened. It turned out he had the disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM caused by a single gene mutation.

It's most often the cause of athletes dropping dead and had been misdiagnosed like it normally is. And I said, you know, I want to use my interest in sports and science to write about this for people who aren't like me buying Scientific American with their disposable income or whatever. And I'd grown up reading Sports Illustrated. So I said, I want to write about sudden cardiac death in athletes and have it be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. And so I plotted my exit from grad school and into

journalism. And that's in fact what happened. I became the science writer at Sports Illustrated. That started my interest in genetics. I know Chuck and Gary have a ton of questions. I want to just slip one in right now. Anytime I've heard about an athlete dropping dead, they're a great athlete. They're at the top of their game. Are there other athletes that also drop dead from this genetic condition that nobody writes about because they were not at the top of their game? Or does it something that only manifest when the body is particularly stressed for being the best in a sport? No. In fact, most of the deaths are high school kids where their first symptom is sudden death.

Their first recognizable symptom is sudden death. The reason you hear about it in great athletes is because they're great athletes. In fact, there are a couple of pro athletes. There was a 49ers player not that long ago and a Bears player who both dropped dead. The 49ers player was named Thomas Harian. And he wasn't that much of a star. So actually people don't really remember it at all. So the vast majority, it happens on a weekly basis,

but it's usually high school kids. And if you make it past puberty, then you're much more likely to sort of have noticeable symptoms arising as opposed to the first thing being sudden death. So it's usually just

a typical high school athlete. Wow. That's so sad. Right, right. to the first thing being sudden death. So it's usually just a typical high school athlete. Oh, that's so sad. Right, right, where the first indication of your illness is death. Is death, yeah. That's wrong. That's wrong on every level. Every level. And sometimes it's like misdiagnosed as asthma.

If someone has shortness of breath and they get prescribed an inhaler, which people think can actually maybe trigger a lethal heart rhythm. So I thought there was some important reasons for more recognition. So Gary, Chuck, what do you have for him? Okay. When researchers started to look at the sort of gene variants, David, they looked at sort of ACT-N3, which is the sort of fast twitch, slow twitch, you know, your aerobic and anaerobic efficiency, pain threshold, height, all these different sort of variants. Have there been a sort of identified sports gene?

You've got to have one of these if you want to be able to succeed. No. So the closest thing I would say to that is you mentioned the ACTN3 gene. So this is a gene, this is the most studied gene associated with sports performance. It codes for a protein called alpha-actinin-3

that's found in your fast twitch muscle fibers, the areas of muscle used for explosive activities. And if you don't have at least one copy, then you don't produce any of that protein and you probably won't be in the Olympic finals of the 100 meters, okay? But the fact that you have it doesn't really tell you anything. And in fact, 80% of the people in the world have it. So while it is sort of, you can think of it as one piece in a puzzle where you don't really know how many pieces there are and you don't know what the puzzle depicts exactly. If you don't have that piece, you can't finish the puzzle. But other than that, it doesn't have any predictive value for you. And that's, and ACTN3 is a gene of large effect. And so most of the genes that influence athleticism are sure, we don't know what they are, the genes and non-genes, because now parts of the genome that don't just code for proteins we know are important as well. The fact

is we're not going to find most of the important genes, I don't think ever. Okay, so David, why do you have a job? Well, I wrote my book about sports genetics, everything I thought was known, and then I moved on to doing different stuff. Okay, that's it. There you go. There won't be a sequel, I don't think. Why do you say that you don't think that we'll find these genes that are so instrumental? What would make you doubt that? So let me go back to that. I talked about sudden death. So let me use that condition just as an example of why it's so hard. So in HCM in the late 90s, there was a gene found that causes the disease. It's a single gene caused disease, easiest thing to find. Doctors said, now we can screen everybody. And they found three.

And you fast forward to today, there's over 1,400 known mutations, any one of which can cause that same disease. And two-thirds of those have only been identified in one family, so-called private mutations. So you could have thousands of people with the exact same disease, stick them in a study, and they'd all have it from different mutations, basically, which makes it very difficult to study. So it turns out you can get to the same place via different genes. And that is a single gene-caused disease and almost nothing.

You know, for something like height, more current thinking is that every part of your genome might be involved in that. So you could put everybody in the world in a study and you wouldn't have a sample size large enough to pick up all these little small effects, even if they were the same genes in different people and they're not. So I think there's a limitation, you know, to some of what we'll figure out in terms of genetic basis. That was articulately put.

I think if I can restate what you said, just so I make sure I understand it. There are certain variations where you need a large population to show all the ways it manifests. And even seven, eight billion people in the world might not be enough to fully get the statistics on that gene. Is that a fair summary of some of what you just said? That's fair. And on top of that, except for very rare conditions, the effect of an individual gene or spot on the genome is so small that to detect the effect size, you need so many people in a

study. And when you're talking about a condition that might be caused by a million variants of tiny, tiny, tiny effect, it becomes very difficult to study. So one of the things I learned in my book reporting was that we had about a decade of research after the sequencing of the human genome that we could just basically throw out.

I mean, it was useful because we learned that the motto for genetics, I think, should be genetics more complicated than we expected. It's like a Facebook status. It's complicated. It's complicated. If you go back and look at news coverage from 2000, you know, from the sequencing of the genome, the predictions were in 2010,

we'd all be walking into our doctor's office with our whole genome on a microchip and getting personalized treatment. And probably you're not doing that. And is there any move in genetics and the research of genetics to, so you're always looking backwards if you're looking at the mutations, if you're looking at the changes that have already happened. Is there any effort to understand the mutation? Because then with artificial intelligence and large data sets,

you might be able to extrapolate and see where mutations and how mutations happen. Yes, so there is. And the main focus has been on mutations that we can really establish a causal for something. And in those cases, understanding the mutation and the specific changes it makes, or most typically engineering the mutation

into an animal, into a mouse or something like that to study it. And you have to be careful with things there too, but there are those- I want T-Rex. Engineering a mutation into a T-Rex to make it especially cool. You end up with Pinky and the brain. That'd be great.

Yeah, well, David, at the moment in this coronavirus, we're all sitting here twiddling our thumbs waiting for live sport. And we have been thrown crumbs with The Last Dance, ESPN's fabulous documentary on Michael Jordan and the last season, The Chicago Bulls. I think you know where I'm headed with this. The three main players are Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman.

Now, in their formative years, am I wrong? They all had something in common. They all had very unusual and very late growth spurts that transformed them into stars. So I'd say Rodman's was the most dramatic, where Rodman's sister was really the athlete of the family. When he graduated high school, he was 5'8", and he was working as a janitor in an airport, and he started growing like crazy. And he grew until he was 6'8", like basically over the course of a year. And in his words, when he said, in addition to the height, he said, it was like my body suddenly knew how to do all this shit that it didn't know how to do before. And so then he went to college and

obviously became a great player. Scotty Pippen was the manager of his college team. He graduated high school at six foot one, started as the team manager at Central Arkansas, you know, and then sprouted to, you know, about seven inches in like his junior year. Jordan was a little bit earlier. He had a growth spurt late in high school. By his own, if you've ever seen him with his family, like he can rest his elbows on everyone else's head, basically, in his family. By his own admission, his brother Larry, who was like 5'7", 5'8", was a better athlete than he was when he was 5'7", 5'8". So all these guys had these very late growth spurts that I think testify to the fact that the skill, of course, is important, but height's really important too. And in fact, I think there's some evidence that the later you go through puberty,

the taller you're likely to be. And so sometimes when we push earlier selection, we might miss things. I mean, I think like Giannis looks like he's gone through puberty since he got drafted, essentially, right? He's been growing in the NBA. So we're always looking for the early developers, right? But I think the late developers

often end up being taller. And Giannis is also working with team trainers, so he's gotten bigger. He's not only grown, because he was basically a child when he came into the NBA. I mean, he's a kid, but he's not only grown,

but working with these trainers, he's grown width-wise and height-wise. And that's got to be, you know, something. I had the exact opposite, David. In high school, I was 6'8". And then in college, I'm 5'10". So...

That happens. You regress to the mean of height. You know what happens. That happens. Tell me about body type. There's a lot of talk about, oh, there are two... Remember we used to have words for that, ectomorph and endomorph, or there was some vocabulary to describe it. And people are always trying to use this way to classify people so they can pass judgment as to whether they will or will not succeed.

Sort of the original judgments that I went back to in my research anyway, early in the 20th century, sports science was, it was called physical education science at the time, was dominated by German science pre-World War II. And I had a bunch of journals translated and you keep seeing this phrase, the perfect form of man that they talk about. And they meant only men and they meant only white men and they meant specifically white men

of average height and average weight. They had this sort of like platonic ideal would be the best at everything, right? So anything that deviated from that was like an aberration. And, you know, there for obvious reasons, their influence became less. And I think sports scientists and coaches and athletes realized that instead of this perfect form and everything else being an aberration, you actually sort of want body types that fit into specific niches. And you saw this play out in athletes' body types around the world. So sports became global in the second half of the 20th century, and some of these stigmas fell away. You saw this artificial selection where

athletes' bodies got more different from one another very, very quickly. So athletes in sports were height as prized, got taller. So the NBA in the mid-1980s, when it went global, proportion of men in the NBA were at least seven feet tall, doubled over the course of two seasons, a little more from five to 11%. Whereas in women's gymnastics, in the last 30 years, the average female gymnast elite has shrunk from five foot three to four foot nine. So they have a lower moment of inertia

for twisting in the air and better power to weight ratio. And so you've seen this, what these two Australian researchers call the big bang of body types, because when they plotted a data point for a whole bunch of sports on a height versus mass graph in the early half of the 20th century, they're all clustered around that average. And then when you plot it for today, all of the body types have flown away from one another into their sort of respective niches. And so I think we've seen these aren't aberrations, They're just more fit for one sporting niche than another. And this continues, this sort of flying apart of body types in

different sports. I just love the male ego hubris of the German scientists to think that everybody who looks like us will be the best at everything. Like by today's standards, that would be like, well, you need a guy with man boobs and a beer belly. He's going to be the best athlete that you can find. Well, you know, you get it. It was, they had a not so veiled agenda, right? And I think that's one of the reasons that was so interesting to see

when they hosted the Olympics and said, you know, we're going to show the race that's the sound of body and mind. And Jesse Owens came in and rained on that parade. But also, interesting scientific premise for what would ultimately lay the seeds of Nazism, you know, and Aryan

supremacy and the rise of Nazi Germany. Way to bring us down, Neil. Keeping it real. Now that we've talked about sudden death and Nazis, like, anybody else got anything downbeat? So, David, could you hang around a little bit and come back

in the third segment when we shoot the shit? Absolutely. Talking about this stuff is my idea of fun. Let's do it. Excellent. Thanks. We've got to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to bring on Stuart Kim. He's a friend of Star break, and when we come back, we're going to bring on Stuart Kim. He's a friend of StarTalk, and he's an academic geneticist. And we'll get deeper into this question of the role of genetics in sports when StarTalk returns. We're back.

StarTalk Sports Edition. The future of sports genetics. I've got with me, of course, Gary O'Reilly. Chuck Nice into segment two. Yeah. There's no end to this, just so you know. We have to bring back on one of our friends of StarTalk, Dr. Stuart Kim. Stuart, welcome back to StarTalk.

Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, you're a former professor of genetics and developmental biology at Stanford and co-founder and CEO of Axgen. Remind us what Axgen is. Are you allowed to tell me? Axgen is a new company that is focused on providing actionable genetics for athletes. And so we test athletes and give them ideas about how to improve their nutrition and how to avoid injuries based on genetics. Wow. Okay, so you're not recoding them? No. They don't go into a back room and come back out, you know, as Captain America, right?

We just came out of a segment where we learned pretty much that knowing someone's genetic profile, genetic code, cannot in and of itself empower you to predict their performance. So if that's the case, first, do you agree with it? But if that's the case, what does one do with this genetic information? In other words, 80% of people could have some athletic gene, but only one of them actually becomes the athlete. So what are we doing with this information, particularly when you're raising a generation of children who want to figure out what they want to be when they grow up? Here's the deal. You're exactly right that we cannot predict your performance very well,

I would say. So, you know, if I had your genome, Gary, I doubt I'd be able to tell your genome from my genome, except that you're derived from Europe and I'm derived from Korea. I'm pretty sure we couldn't figure out anything about, you know, Michael Phelps or LeBron James from their genomes yet. But what we can do is we can figure out where your risk of injury is from. And so, you know, part of being an athlete is not getting hurt so that you can achieve all of the things that you were given. And I'm betting that your career was partly and probably strongly defined

by, you know, injuries and avoiding injuries. And, you know, we all have friends. We know all people that were great athletes that got hurt and then their whole career got derailed. Wait, wait, Stuart, are you saying just by looking at Gary, you know, he's injury prone? No, but looking at his DNA, I could find out, you know, so. No, that's cold. That's cold. So how do you make the determination between

the genetics and, let's just say, the occupational hazard? I mean, are you looking for an anomaly? Like, for instance, tennis elbow. It's a repetitive motion. I mean, I'm going to get it if I play tennis. It's very, very common I mean, I'm going to get it if I play tennis.

It's very, very common. So if I don't get it, is that because I'm genetically predisposed to have a strength that stops me from getting it? Or is it my form? Or is it my training and the fact that I rest? What is it? Yeah, it's all of those, Chuck. I mean, if you have bad form, you're more likely to get it. If you play a lot of tennis, you're more likely to get it.

And if you had bad genes, you're more likely to get it. And it's the bad genes is just a new factor that you could add to your repertoire. So now you're going to go into tennis and you'd rather not get tennis elbow. And in addition to all of the right training you can do with your coach, you could have your trainer know about what types of injuries you're at risk for.

And you could try to work on those before you get injured. So you could avoid the tennis elbow. You could avoid the knee injury. So this is a tailor-made practice regimen for the athlete. So that's a very important cog in this wheel, isn't it? Oh, exactly right. And so an example would be, we're working with cross-country teams and there's a 62% risk of stress fractures. So there's 62% of them get stress fractures during the season because they run so much. And instead of letting, and then the end of the season comes and the championship comes and half your team is out because of this stress fracture. It takes just

a couple months to heal, but that's long enough to wreck your whole season. And then the smarter way to do that would be at the beginning of the season, know which ones are at increased risk for stress fracture. And it's easy to kind of avoid stress fracture. Just look at biomechanics and move some of the aerobic exercise away from impact and over to the elliptical or something like that. Or a triathlete, they can just bike or swim more instead of run more. It's a repetitive use injury. It can be avoided if you knew about it coming on. And so with your team getting a 62% hit on who gets hurt, this is a big deal and it could have huge impact on endurance runners. That's just one example. But there's concussion and ankle sprains and knee injuries,

shoulder injuries for all the different sports. And that's the new way forward. So like if you have a team and I have a team, but your team does this informed training, your team isn't going to get injured as much. And hence, when we meet each other in the playoffs, your team is going to have a better chance. So when you say concussion, is there a genetic predisposition to resist concussion? I mean, my dad used to say, I'll never forget, I fell once. And like, you ever fall and you hit your head so hard, it

makes that egg cracking sound, right? And then you're like, you ever fall and you hit your head so hard, it makes that egg cracking sound, right? And then you're like, everything goes white, right? And then all of a sudden... Wait, wait, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, this is your origin story. Yes, it is. Chuck wasn't funny before then. And then he became a great comedian. And it's so funny because, you know, I came in the house and I was a little disoriented.

And my sister was like, Dad, Chuck hit his head and it sounded like an egg cracking. Oh, my God. You know, I think you should take him to the hospital. And my father went, that boy's head is harder than calculus. Ain't nothing wrong with him. Tough love. Tough love. But I only say that to say, aside from the fact that I had a lousy parent,

is it possible that somebody might have a thicker head or may have more viscous fluid in their brain or might have some way of, like some people get hit and don't get concussions. Why? Stuart, you have to begin your answer by saying, Chuck, let me get this into your thick head. Oh my God.

Okay, go Chuck. You brought back so many memories for me. Go Stuart. Well, the good news is that it's preventable. It turns out that neck strengthening exercises are good ways to reduce your chance of getting concussion. So like if, Chuck, if you were to have this increased risk for concussion, you could, you know, before, you could just exercise your neck, strengthen that and reduce risk. There's also fancy helmets that you can wear in bicycling and football

to try to reduce your risk of concussion. You know, if you play football, there's going to be a big risk of concussion, no way around it. But these are ways you can reduce the risk. You know, going forward, genes that we found from this concussion genetics are clear brain genes. One of them has to do with growing out dendrites from your neurons. And another one, if you delete the gene, it causes terrible brain defects, mental retardation and vision loss and hearing acuity loss. So terrible defects,

but a small change in these genes gives you a risk for concussion. But the identification of these two genes could allow scientists to understand the underlying mechanisms for concussion that could lead to treatments based on biomolecular ways to treat the disease and the cause of the disease itself. Chuck, there was a – Jerry Seinfeld has this bit about football. And he said, you know, men started playing football and they found that their heads were cracking. So rather than stop playing the game, they decided to wear helmets and continue. Doctor, you've just made me think, right? Rather than stop playing the game, they decided to wear helmets and continue. That's pretty good. Doctor, you've just made me think, right?

There's this question. Can man run any faster than Usain Bolt has run in 100 meters? Uh-huh. Now, you've made me think. What if someone who has the potential to run extremely fast like Bolt went and researched their own genetic code and found out that their composition has to be trained in a certain way, that they have a certain set of muscles, a certain set of collagen, or whatever it is that's there. Are we looking now at elite athletes searching their genetic code for answers to improving their training, therefore improving their performance?

And here we go, run even faster than people say you can't, the new SaneBot. We do. So how to make you run faster? run faster. Instead of running faster performance, can we, by researching our own genetics, improve our performance just by understanding our body's composition and therefore exposure to injury or better ways to train for our own selves? Yeah. So the way to think about this is Andrew is a guy that works with me in action. He's a triathlete. And what would happen to him five years ago is he would be about equal. He's a professional triathlete.

He'd be about equal with other triathletes. Then he'd get hurt. And then the other triathletes would progress during the month or two that he was hurt. And he would come back, he would be behind. And so every time he got hurt, it reduced his performance because he couldn't train. And so you have two people. So imagine you had Usain Bolt and his identical twin, and the identical twin got hurt, then the real Usain Bolt's going to win. And that's the way to

end up performing better. We don't have genetic knowledge of how to train better, to make your muscles better, to make you faster directly like that. What we can do is we can make you faster because you train the whole time instead of taking a month off to recover. And the reason why is that we don't have enough data to figure out why you're strong and why you're fast. We do have data because people go to hospitals, and I get data from all the hospitals that I can figure out what kind of genetics made you go into the hospital in the first place.

That's what I relay back. A big part of horse racing is when they don't shoot the horse for having a broken leg, can an injury be rapidly healed? And they have tactics. Yeah, no, that's terrific. So I'm just asking you about humans. There's one thing to avoid injury. Then when you are injured, what can you do to come back as fast as possible? Is that another genetic fix? Yeah. And now that we're starting to know what causes you to get injured, we're going to look and see if that affects your rate of recovery. You know, like return to play for concussion.

Now that the hard work has been done, that we found the markers for concussion, we can ask, you know, are the people with risk of concussion, should they take a longer time to come back? Yeah, because I think I read some research a couple years ago when it was really all the rage talking about the traumatic brain injuries. And one of the things that was discussed was the fact that having a concussion makes it easier for you to have a concussion. Right. So, like, that's the big deal. So, you know, the research bore out the fact that part of it is that you're not fully recovered. So,

you know, you're, so what happens is you seem like you're completely recovered. You seem as though you're totally normal, but you're really not. And just beneath the surface is that potential for another concussion. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so that's why it's really important to prevent the first injury. So once you get injury, that's your biggest risk factor for getting injured. You know, it was our guy, Kevin Durant for Golden State Warriors out here. You know, he had an injury and then he played again without fully recovering. Then he had a much worse injury. Yeah. And so you see that happening a lot.

You want to avoid that first injury because then you're always injured. It's funny you say that because it was not just Kevin Durant, which was the worst, but Klay Thompson and the greatest shooter of all time. Steph Curry.

Steph Curry, thank you. And Steph Curry. All three of them had the same exact thing, which was they were not fully recovered from injury and ended up having a much, much worse injury. Exactly. Okay, but this series, this sub-series of Star Sports Edition is focusing on phenoms. And what I want to know from you, Stuart, is you're giving statistics of injury and you do better,

and you'll do better because you're not injured because you get to train. What is going on in your research that tells you about the singularity of somebody's performance that makes them the greatest in a generation, if not the greatest of all time? Right. So let's try to figure that out. And let me just give you a 10 second deal of all of genetics. What's kind of cool about genetics in the last 10 years in my book is that we've switched from the old style of thinking, which is called Mendelian genetics. Mendelian genetics, Gregor Mendel in the 1880s figured out genetics and that's, you have a mutation in a gene and you get a disease kind of thing.

Turns out that lots and lots and lots of stuff about human traits isn't Mendelian genetics. They call it quantitative genetics or complex genetics. I'll give you an example. Height. Your height is determined by your genetics. So if you have a twin brother, an identical twin brother, that person will have a height about within an inch of your height. And so your height is 80% determined by genetics. Turns out that that 80% that's genetics is spread out over tens of thousands of genes in your genome. It's quantitative. They're all contributing an infinitesimal amount to your height. And that's what... Or at least one ten thousandth of your height. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking to a physicist. So a physicist thinks infinitesimal

is a lot smaller than a biologist thinking infinitesimal. It wouldn't be infinitesimal if there's 10,000 of them. Yeah, no, yeah. What that means is there's not this gene for height. It's more complicated than that. Yeah, and so the Finnish cross-country skier who had a single gene in the EPO receptor that gave him lots and lots of red blood cells.

That's about the only case I know. Who was this? Who was this? David Epstein talked about him. It's in his book. His name is Iro Maanta Terenta. He's a Finnish Olympic gold medal cross-country skier. Okay.

Okay. Gene mutation doctor. Correct me if I'm wrong. If I say any of this wrong, please just slap me down as a bad idiot pupil. He has something. The gene allowed him to create something like 60% more red blood cells in his system, which is, for a cross-country skier,

oh, yeah, that's the Klondike. His body is blood doping. No, exactly. When you blood dope, one of the ways to do it is to inject EPO, which stands for erythropoietin. And this guy had high levels of EPO all the time. And so he didn't have to inject himself,

but he had the same benefit from injecting himself. But it's not illegal, even though he's doped up. Yeah, they had to go to court and he eventually proved himself that it was a natural mutation. And so they allowed him to compete. And so he has sky high levels of red blood cells, but he's the only one.

Well, what about something as simple as testosterone? Because testosterone levels in men are genetically determined. And your level of testosterone is going to cause a lot of different physiological changes in your body. Yeah. So, you know, is it okay then to stimulate testosterone? I'm not talking about injecting testosterone shots, but perhaps to stimulate testosterone to give yourself an edge. I don't know how to stimulate testosterone other than by injecting testosterone. But I do know that the genetics of testosterone is 9,000 different genes.

So we can actually predict how much testosterone you have pretty well, but it takes us 9,000 different genes to do so. And as an athlete, you really want to know your level of testosterone because it really determines your performance. So is that an unfair advantage that is fair? I mean, that's a good way to say it. Yeah. Is there an unfair advantage that's fair? The fact that my body produces so much testosterone and this other body does not or vice versa, probably vice versa if we're talking about me. And so this guy is more muscular. He's bigger. He's, you know, all these things.

I mean, he has an unfair fair advantage. Well, you just hit on a really interesting philosophical question, which is, are all men created equal? And, you know, we might think we're all created equal. We have to be fair and you can't have anything that I don't have. But our genes are different. We're not created equal. Some of us are going to have genetically more testosterone. Some of us are going to be genetically taller. So it's not NASCAR where every car is functionally identical. Yeah, it's not like that. The race is really between drivers. If you had the DNA of five-year-old kids, you could figure out who's going to be seven feet tall

with massive amounts of muscle from their high testosterone levels. You should be able to figure that out just based on DNA. And then you could say, well, this kid has this unfair genetic advantage. What that means is if you really take this into the future, sports would have to be, this is basketball for everyone between these two heights. Yeah. This is track and field for everyone with this level of testosterone. And by the way, then you're not asking what your gender is. You just have these hormonal ranges, and then you're in that range. And then you're seeing people compete basically on a level playing field.

That's an interesting possible feature. It's interesting. They already make men and women, you know, segregate sports into men and women. And in theory, you could segregate that into height and testosterone levels so that you're competing against people that have, you know, your same genetic makeup. Right. You know what, though? In a way, we already do that because think about it.

You have peewee leagues, right? You have high school football. Then you have college football. And then you have the pros. And when you look at the pros, those guys are pretty much all on the same level. Yeah. those guys are pretty much all on the same level. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting that the very best college team there ever was, the worst professional team would wipe their asses. Annihilate them. Right, right. And I hate when people try to have that argument. Yeah, there is no argument. There's no argument. I hate when guys are just like, no, you know, the 1985 Tigers, Clemson Tigers, would definitely have been able to beat the Detroit Lions.

And it's like, shut up. Shut up. Before you go. Yeah, we got to land this point. Before we circle the airport, how are or can we even crack a genetic code with so much variety and so many different ways to multiply? How are we going to? Is it even possible? I'm going to answer for him. Just give it to AI and they'll figure it out.

We need a lot of people to do this sort of thing. So something like 100,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 people because the data is so complicated and the genome is so big. So what you're saying scientifically, just to be explicit about this, is the more uncommon or the more singular the feature you're trying to identify and understand, the greater must be your data set to draw from in order to say anything sensible about it. Is that a fair summary? The smaller the effect of an individual locus is. Then the bigger your data set needs to be. So what we have is 9,000 different genes, but each of them have such a small effect

that you need a huge number of people to see the difference. And for traits that are run by lots and lots of genes with a small effect, we're just going to have to have a lot of people. And so until we can get cohorts of athletes with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, the genetics of athletes is going to be difficult because I think a lot of it is this quantitative genetics. Dr. Kim, it's great to have you on now your second appearance on Star Talk. I'm so proud. And we warned you, we come back to you and we did, and this will not be the last for sure.

We're going to come out of the segment. When we come back, we're going to shoot the shit as we call it, just to explore what this brave new world is and what it means, the genetics of sports. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. We'll be right back. We're back, StarTalk. We're bringing David Epstein back. David, welcome back.

Thank you. Glad to be back. Yeah, so sports journalist specializing in the genetics of sports. And I'm kind of tickled that you came from sort of an academic plight as a geologist. So we're kindred spirits in that, applying the science we know to wherever we find that it needs it. Let me lead off with a question here. This urge to find a genetic formula, where does ambition come in? The reason why I ask is I've read quite a bit throughout my life

on what people say about athletic performance. Meanwhile, the athletes are just doing their thing. And then you have these non-athletes who are specialists commenting on them. For example, I was watching a marathon. It was the New York, I think it was the New York City Marathon. And there was a woman who had had children already, okay? So she had come to marathon running. Either she returned to it, or this might have been her first occasion. And they were commenting that her hips were large, and her feet were pointed outwards. And they were commenting that her hips were large and her feet were pointed outwards. And they were analyzing it saying, this is very inefficient because energy is trying to go outward, but she's got to go forward. And this is not working. She won the race.

Yeah. Okay. And this is their analysis along the way. Yeah. So they're trying to make predictions based on biokinetics. Yeah. When clearly something else is happening there. Point one. Point two. I've heard people talk about why Mexicans have historically dominated the walking races. What do they say? Well, the Mexicans are shorter and they've got the

shorter legs and they're closer to the ground and the center. And they're starting to analyze it biokinetically. And no one is going back to like the first Mexican to win that race who became a national hero and inspired entire generations of those to follow. So inspiration somehow doesn't show up in the equations people are trying to put on the table. Yeah. And here we have Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s showing lazy, shiftless black people setting an expectation and a model for what people think black people are. And then, like you said in segment one, 1936 Olympics in Germany in Hitler Stadium with the Nazi swastika up at the top. And Jesse Owens

set four world records in 15 minutes or something. There's some crazy short interval of time that he does this. And then from then on, American black runners have dominated the sprints from then onward. And so I think to myself, inspiration has got to matter more than genetics, given what I see here. It's hugely important. And to think of your running example, I mean, I think one thing that gets at is that sports enthusiasts hear a nonstop chatter and commentary about nature and nurture from people who have not read anything of a centuries of study on it, which I think is sort of unfortunate, right? It comes up in every sporting event you watch and nobody, and they haven't dug into any of the literature. And

so, for example, with that runner you mentioned who her feet were pointed out or whatever, one thing that's pretty clear now is that what looks like the best running form does not in the lab equal the best running economy, that people find sort of solutions based on their own physiology and the things that we think is the beautiful form may not be the best. And so that's interesting. So people are, people can be inventive with their own body form and body type. That's right. In ways that the predictor wouldn't know or think. I mean, if you, if you go YouTube Paula Radcliffe, who was the most, for a long time, the world record holder in the marathon, the most dominant female marathoner. And maybe she's the person you're talking about because she came in one New York shortly after having a baby. She has the best running economy ever measured in a lab

for a woman. And her form looks horrible. Like one of her legs wings around, she bobs her head all over the place. Maybe that's her. Yeah, thank you. That'll be her. And one other quick story before I release this back to Chuck and Gary. My father was a world-class athlete, runner, in middle distance. 800 meters? At the time, it was 600 meters. Okay. That race doesn't run anymore. 600 yards, actually.

And he had the fifth fastest time in the world in that event. He also ran other events, the hurdles and the relays and things. But the point I'm making is, you can ask, why did he start running? Because he was in gym class in high school. And the gym teacher said, they went into the track and field unit of gym. And everyone's lined up, and the instructor points to my father and says, Cyril Tyson over there, he does not have the body type that would make a good runner. And my father heard that, and he said, no one is going to tell me what

I can't do in life. And so it's because someone told him his body type was wrong that he decided to run. And then he became world-class. And in fact, in 1948, he ran in Hitler's Olympic Stadium in what was a cobbled together, because the Olympics was still canceled, obviously was still in the wake of the Second World War. But there was something called the GI Olympics where they contested the theaters of operations,

the African theater, European theater, Pacific theaters. And so the GIs, athletic GIs competed and he competed in that stadium. And so my point is, this is another case where somebody is trying to predetermine what you can achieve. At the end of the day, the person's ambition overrides it and that's what ends up getting them to achieve ultimately. And what I wonder,

is there a gene then for ambition? So I would say, and I think we can all hope maybe that your father's gym teacher was a genius at reverse psychology. Maybe. Probably not. Probably not, but yeah. I think one of the main takeaways for me from reporting this 14, there were sort of a few, but a very general one was that some things that we think are totally genetically based, like the reflexes it takes to hit a fastball, for example, turn out to be completely training dependent and not genetically based. And other things that I would have assumed were total just acts of volition, like the compulsion to train and to be in motion actually have important genetic components. And so I think

when we prejudge people, it's basically always done by intuition. And for me, that reporting that went into the book was a real warning shot not to trust my intuition or other people's intuition about this sort of balance in nature and nurture and who's going to be good at what in sports and in general. And speaking of what Neil just said, there's a psychology attached to that. You said, we can only wish that the coach was an excellent reverse psychologist. But think about this. Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time.

Now, that's not an opinion. That is empirical. If you just look at straight data sets, he's the greatest of all time. But no, I only say that because the thing that I find makes him the greatest player of all time. It's not the data. It's the fact that every single person who works with him says one thing about him. And that includes a guy that we had on this show

who designed sneakers for Nike. And what he said was, Michael Jordan makes you the best or you gotta go. Like you become the best at what you do when you work with him. How do you measure that? Like here's a guy who designed sneakers who was like, oh yeah, I'm a great sneaker designer

because Michael Jordan made me become a better sneaker designer. So what is that? I mean, I don't even know what to do with that. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the issues we get into sports where we measure all sorts of things and we decide they're important because we can measure them. We're not necessarily measuring things because they're important, right? Very good point. Very good point.

That's a difficult thing to, that's a very difficult thing to measure. Do you know what this is called? The sphere of positive influence. Oh. Michael is kind of Jupiter. And he has this unbelievable sphere of influence. I love the cosmic reference. Thank you.

Keep going, keep going. You keep raising your game. And I think, Chuck, you're talking about Dwayne Edwards, who we had on the show? Dwayne Edwards. And he knew that

if he brought his best game, he'd probably get kicked out. So he's got to bring his best game ever. Now, if that's the sort of positive influence an athlete can bring to those around them,

that team, that unit is only going to go upwards and onwards. Yeah. He said that the thing about working with Michael and everybody who works with him knows this, that he doesn't accept anything except excellence. So if you're not bringing your best, he points that out and you either, you either elevate to bring your best or you got to go. It's like, that's wild. I'm a little wary sometimes of that though. Cause like there are of, of giving, you know,

too much credit to his sort of eagerness or critiques of others, I guess. Cause then you see guys like Tim Duncan, you know, who are very different than that. So I think some of this stuff is context dependent. And that sometimes, you know, instead of telling people like, be like Jordan or be like Steve Jobs, it's just as much that we probably tolerate some of that behavior because they're so good, right? So I think there's a both. There's an elevation, but I don't think it's the only way to do it. And I think it can be context dependent as well. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's the only way to do it. And I think it can be context dependent as well. That's a good point.

Yeah. That then becomes the environment that you allow someone like Michael Jordan to exist in and the boundaries you create. That's something we're going to drill down into in the rest of this series on occasion. Let me ask you if you've heard this, maybe you haven't. A couple of years ago, I saw this documentary. So I'm not read on this particular case. And it was all about this runner who, for some reason, could recover so quickly from long races and just never got muscle fatigue. muscle fatigue. And then they studied him and found out that his oxygen absorption in his cells is off the charts. No matter how long he runs, his blood cells keep absorbing oxygen.

And is there a way to find people, if you were to screen people, maybe he's the only guy that has it, but that's because he's just the guy that has it and he's running. Like, I'm sure there's other people around who have that, but they just never felt like, eh, I should go run 26 miles for no reason at all. You got to want to do it. You got to want to do it. You've got to want to do it. Yeah, you've got to want to do it. So I wonder if there's a way to screen for people who have certain genetic predispositions for greatness and then see if they want to do it. Yeah, and I don't know the case of that runner, but you bring up two interesting points. One of which is I think we should screen for physiology instead of genetics because physiology is the combination of what the person has been through so far and their genetics. And so that's what you want to see. I always make this analogy to people think it's really sexy to go get a test for, you know, genes for height. And I'm like, why not just use a tape measure, right? You measure it directly or for speed, right? A stopwatch is a lot better

genetic test than ACTN3. But yes, you're right. And so we can, in fact, there's a study I referenced in the sports scene where in Canada, when they were doing physiological screening for people to be firefighters, out of like 1500 people, it turned out that six just had this incredible oxygen carrying capacity, even though they weren't working out. So you find these people, so they were screening for firefighters, but those people pop up. Or one guy wrote about a Finnish cross country skier named Eero Manturanta, turned out he had this incredibly high red blood cell count, you know, so he could carry more oxygen. And that actually was traced to a single gene mutation. So then the rest of his family members were screened, you know, and several of them had

been world-class cross-country skiers. And so we don't usually find that single gene, but we see in endurance sports other people with that same physiology. So the fact that we haven't, it may be caused by a whole bunch of genes, so it makes it harder to find, but you can find that physiology. And those people tend to be overrepresented in the sports anyway, but I'm sure they'd be more overrepresented if, you know, like those firefighters had like the oxygen carrying capacity of college runners when they weren't doing anything, basically. So we've got to land this plane. Let me offer a thought, and David will give you the last comment on this. So if you find natural variations in people's physiology, be they genetic or otherwise, can you imagine a day in the future where we gather together what all those genetic variations are and then have a designer baby

with those variations. It's still human. You're still using variations that have manifested by natural causes. And now you put that in and then you breed an entire generation of professional athletes that will be more entertaining for the fan than anybody who's out there today. That's a big question. It brings up sort of two thoughts. The first of which is I think that would be harder to do than we think because, you know, we used to call all the parts of the genome that don't code for proteins junk DNA. And now we don't do that anymore because it turns out that even though they don't code

for proteins, they impact how all the other stuff is working. And so I think cobbling together variations end up with some results you don't expect. I mean, we can see, right, like two parents are bringing the same genes together multiple times and their kids end up pretty different. It's like the magic of how genes combine differently. Very good point. But I do think there are single gene targets we know. So is Aromanturanta like this, you know, this one that causes increased basically made him naturally what Lance Armstrong was through technology. And there's another that I did this American Life piece about that caused extreme muscle growth in a woman who became an Olympic medalist sprinter. And so in those cases, the powerful effect of one mutation is so large that it like overwhelms the rest of the system.

Or could you alter someone's genes that are related to excreting growth hormone, growth hormone releasing hormone gene? So you could theoretically design for characteristics even without knowing all of those genes just by getting these very powerful individual mutations. I think we should be extremely reticent to do that. And to me, sports is kind of, you know, it's a contrivance. You take agreed upon rules and add meaning. If I were trying to see the fastest runner, I'd go to the zoo and watch the cheetah. So to me, it's more about being a uniquely human endeavor. Or as this Canadian philosopher I love named Bernard Suits called, it's the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. And so I think if you're trying too hard to surmount the

obstacles you voluntarily accepted, then it becomes something more like WWE and less like kind of the sports that I love, I guess. That's funny. You call that sports. I call that marriage. You're in trouble again, Chuck. I'm in trouble again. All right. We got to land the plane right there. David, thank you for bringing your perspectives and expertise to StarTalk Sports Edition. I also want to thank Dr. Stuart Kim for lending us his expertise as well. Gary, Chuck, as always, thanks for making this work.

And our next Phenom shows will include guests such as our favorite neuroscientist, Dr. Heather Berlin. And we're also going to get professor of psychology, Angela Duckworth, and NFL head coach, Pete Carroll. Yeah, I said it. Pete Carroll is going to come on right here on StarTalk Sports Edition. So we're going to call it quits there. And I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.