Cosmic Queries – Sports Genetics

Will genetically-modified humans be the athletes of tomorrow? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice answer your Cosmic Queries on sports and genetics alongside geneticist Stuart Kim, PhD, founder and CEO of AxGen.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And for this installment, we're doing cosmic queries, sports and genetics.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So evil.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna go there in this episode. Oh my god. I got with me Chuck Nice. Chuck, good to have you. Hey, for this episode, you can call me Jimmy the Greek.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For anyone over 50, they might remember comments Jimmy the Greek made, who sets betting odds on sports teams. And he just couldn't shake it the day he just put his foot in his mouth. Yeah, boy. But anyhow, we also have Gary O'Reilly. Gary? Hey Neil. You are the only person that gives authenticity to the sports edition, having been once a professional athlete yourself. I just feel compelled to make that point every single time. So today, we're taking our solicited cosmic queries, okay, from our fanbase, and we're gonna hand them to our expert, Dr. Stuart Kim. Stuart, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, so you are CEO of AxGen, a company that looks at athletes' genes to help them prevent injuries. That sounds like the top story, but this... So tell us the truth, doctor. What super athlete are you building in your basement right now? And did you create LeBron James in a lab?

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, look, I finished with the guy's CV here. So, he's a retired professor at GuessWhere, Stanford University. If you're on the video version of this call, he's proudly wearing a Stanford sweatshirt. So, Dr. Kim, if I may call you Stuart, welcome to StarTalk. Yeah, well, thanks. That makes me your personal geneticist for this.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, Gary, take it from here if you've got questions for him.

• 2:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, yeah, for sure. Let, I mean, just to sort of add to Dr. Kim's bio. The specialization in XGen, uh, which he's CEO and co-founder of, is sports injury. And I think if you, if you were to discuss with elite athletes, do you want to know if you have genes that make you run faster or more powerful, let's say? Nah, I already know this stuff.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57Gary O'Reilly?

  But if you can tell, if you can tell me if I am predisposed to a weakness in a certain, maybe bone density, maybe collagen, maybe some other aspect of my genetic makeup, then you're going to grab my attention. So this is, this is a really interesting field that the doctor's gone into or professor, whichever title he prefers best. All right, let's hear the question. All right, first one up is from Leslie Goodwill from Patreon. Do you think that genetically modified humans will be banned from sports because they will be competing against people who do not have an altered benefit?

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, good.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, for sure. That has to be banned from sport. You know, if, um, if you could genetically modify humans, think of what you could do. You could give everybody an activated EPO receptor, for example. So EPO is a growth hormone that makes you make red blood cells. And that's the thing that all the Tour de France cyclists love to inject so that they have more red red blood cells. And you could just bypass all the injections and directly activate the EPO receptor so your stem cells crank out red blood cells. And then there's no reason to stop there. You might as well just start modifying all of the genes that we know

• 4:19Speaker 02

  will make you a slightly, slightly better athlete. And then why stop there? Because I wouldn't stop with human genes. I would start putting in animal genes. So that you could gain, you could gain the abilities of your favorite animal for your favorite sport, you know, within reason, but there's, there's obvious things you could put in to make you, you know, stronger than a human could be. But, you know, uh, they have to ban, they have to ban all genetic modifications from, uh, if you, if you can't even dope, then you definitely can't screw around with your genome. Wow.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Stuart, so we have to devote an entire episode to seeing what is in your basement. We have to do that.

• 5:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck, what's, what's your animal gene? Which animal gene are you gonna go for?

• 5:10Chuck Nice?

  Uh, if you, to make you super athletic? For me, I'm going with cheetah because it's an animal that can run at 70 miles an hour.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:20Chuck Nice?

  And when they found out that I did it, they'll be like, well, he's a cheetah because we found some cheetah in him.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  And your play is gonna be go long, right?

• 5:32Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Just go long.

• 5:34Chuck Nice?

  Every single play is the same play. Chuck, go long.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. Just go long, wait in the end zone and catch it. So I think that's gonna really screw up.

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, you already have your joke lined up for when you do this, right?

• 5:47Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Stuart, just to be clear, when you describe this, this, um, uh, red blood cell production, uh, are you saying that the more red blood cells you have in your body, I, I don't know if I'm oversimplifying this, the more capacity you have to deliver oxygen to where it's needed in the performance of your muscles? Is that a fair characterization?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  No, that's, that's, that's right on. And, uh, the problem is that you want more than is healthy for you because if you have so many red blood cells, then they could clot. And then if they clot, then you get a stroke and you die. And so that's the downside of having so much red blood cells. You may win the Tour de France, but you could also die from a stroke.

• 6:32Chuck Nice?

  It's a fair trade-off.

• 6:35Chuck Nice?

  I won the Tour de France and then I dropped dead of a stroke, you know, but I died a happy man.

• 6:41Gary O'Reilly?

  It's sort of genetic doping in the same way as with using drugs, performance enhancing drugs. Not every athlete reacts the same way. Would that be the same if you were to genetically modify an athlete? But it may or may not have the same effect on every athlete.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. You know, because everything is so multi-factorial, it wouldn't have the same effect. And then you could just keep on dialing it in. If it didn't have the effect you want, just keep on modifying. So you do get the result.

• 7:16Chuck Nice?

  So now with that in mind, so right now, um, there's research underway with stem cells that actually address problems that are in a fully developed person. And is there a way to do the same thing with, uh, um, athletes? So you would deliver a specific desired effect genetically, but after development is already done?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Right, so you could do this. I think you could do this depot receptor activation in the stem cells of an athlete. And I don't know, I think a couple of months later, they're going to be, they're going to have a lot more red blood cells.

• 8:01Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Their stem cells. So I think that would work, you know, at least conceivably.

• 8:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but let me, let me, let's, let's back this up a bit, okay? In baseball, there's something called Tommy John surgery, where they take a tendon. You know, a pitcher overuses their arm and they get injured. They take a tendon, I don't know the details, but they stitch it through a hole in the bone and reattach it. And then they come back and some of them were better than they were before. No, it's not genetics, it's carpentry. But who is the ethicist who is drawing the line between what is allowed and what is not? If one is carpentry and one is genetics?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Well, this is an, I'm not an athlete and I don't know. You know, that's gotta be the, the baseball guys, you know, to decide what's, what's allowed in baseball and what is cheating. You know, in, there's something called the World Anti-Doping Association where they try to figure out what you can and can't do. But I, I hear what you're saying because these guys that come back from Tommy John surgery throw faster than they used to. And it takes two years and then they come back and throw faster. So, um.

• 9:14Chuck Nice?

  I, I mean, is that the surgery or is it the fact that you have two years where you're not throwing the ball at a hundred miles an hour?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:21Chuck Nice?

  I mean, that, that could be it too.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Could be it too, yeah.

• 9:27Gary O'Reilly?

  The fun, the funny thing is, it's probably a combination of both, but to take two years out for an athlete is mentally destructive. You've got to be able to physically retain everything you had before you had the surgery. And, and quite often you can, using through surgical processes, strengthen ligaments. They used to through a term called reefing where they kind of strip off filaments and then wind it around like you do, you see on cable ropes that hold chips to the mort.

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 9:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So they're, they're kind of wrapped around to give it extra strength. So that, they can actually perform that sort of procedure, or they used to, what they do now, I'm not sure, to help strengthen the ligaments and then allow you to then progress forward with, with your sport.

• 10:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it seems to me that this distinction is highly artificial in the following sense, uh, Stuart. The, um, yeah, to go in and restitch your ligaments and tendons, that sounds very cheating. All right? To go in and dope your blood genetically, that sounds like it's cheating. But suppose I go to the gym and I lift weights and you don't? I make my muscles bigger, faster, stronger. Because I'm doing things to me. I'm eating high protein because I know about proteins. All right, it's not just carbs. I need protein to rebuild the muscle. That's biochemistry. So why is that not cheating?

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But all of a sudden, to manipulate genes, that is.

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  You know, I think.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  I think you're right, you know, um. This testosterone doping that you're not allowed to do in the Tour de France is not that obvious that that's a bad thing. If you're kind of middle aged and you would just like to be able to exercise like you were young. And so just a mild increase in your testosterone. So my, my testosterone level is going down. Wait, before I continue, you gotta remember, I'm a geneticist. Like I'm talking about stuff that I have basically layperson knowledge of, so. You don't have to believe me, but testosterone level goes down as you get older. And, you know, I could bump that up just to my young level. Not, not dangerous, but just the young levels.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  That clearly gives me better workout. And I don't race, I don't, and nobody's gonna test my blood. But I would get better workouts and I wouldn't feel so, um, you know.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tired and old. Tired and old, is that what you're trying to say, Doc?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get humiliated by these young guys and their sandals passing me on my bicycle. That's the fun. So if I had just a little bit of testosterone, you know, maybe I would get the old energy back. And we're not, you know, if I just get a little bit, it's safe. You know, it's just, you know, I'm not gonna endanger my heart if I, if I get normal, but youthful levels of testosterone. So there's lots of things that, you know, people do, but we benefit. You're amateur athlete, you're just not in a, it's a competitive edge. So that's why I can't really claim that I'm better than anyone if I'm doping with testosterone. It's just that my personal rise would get a little bit more, more, more extreme.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Stuart, let me be devil's advocate here before we get to our next question and just pose that people pay a lot of money. And athletes are paid a lot of money to perform at levels that are basically superhuman. That's what we pay to see. We don't want to see your your neighbor perform. We want to see people who have talents that leave you stupefied. Can you imagine a day where all bets are off? And all genetic modification is possible? And it's the genetically modified Olympics? People would pay big, big money for that. Like, what do you care?

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're trying to put forth a, a, a, a better version of humans in the sports arena. You don't foresee a day where that would be embraced?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Well, why, why wait for genetics? Why not just do that today? So tomorrow, there's good genetics will come into the fiction. Let's make it clear. You can't, at least I don't know of anybody where you can modify an athlete to improve their performance. There's no way the US will, will, will let you do that. But today, why don't you just have, you know, the doped up Major League Baseball league? Now, I could have all built up and stir it up and it's like Roger Clemens against Barry Bonds. And all of them are doped up to the gills and they're flinging home runs and throwing 110 mile an hour fastballs at each other and there's no rules.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Maybe you could just see what's the best that doping can make, you know, in a sport where there's clearly advantages of doping. And you have all of these, you know, so there's a honest league that we have and you're not allowed to cheat. And then you could have the cheaters league and just say, yeah, I'm, I'm really going for it. This is, you know, just look at, look at these muscles. And if you hit it, it goes a mile. And if you pitch it, it goes past the hit. And you just have these guys playing against each other and see who wins out.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I love it. So just, we're just honest about the cheating rather than cheating and not trying to.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Like, who would win if Clemens touched, touched against Barry Bonds? Like, what, what's the deal there?

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Well, thank you for that predictive future.

• 15:16Gary O'Reilly?

  That sounds more like whacked out races.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, let's get to the next question.

• 15:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, this is from Josh V on Patreon. We've had so many questions, so all of our listeners, thank you so much. And we apologize for not being able to get through them because there's about six or seven shows worth of questions here. Do professional sports teams study a player's genetics when evaluating their roster acquisitions? For example, in the NFL Draft, and that from Josh V from Patreon.

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we will get to that answer after this break.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See what I did there?

• 15:51Gary O'Reilly?

  You did it again.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great question. Right when StarTalk Cosmic Queries returns on sports, performance and genetics. We'll be right back.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition Cosmic Queries. We have Dr. Stuart Kim with us, who is an expert in sports genetics. So Stuart, welcome. Of course, we have Gary and Chuck. So. Hello. Gary, you had a little bit of extra bio that we had left out of Stuart early on. What did you have?

• 16:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I mean, well, apart from AxGen being co-founded by Dr. Stuart Kim, on it are some elite athletes and they're delving into the area of sports injury. But part of one of the reasons why Dr. Kim is with us today on this Cosmic Query is we are going to be running a series of shows on the athletic phenom. Now, we'll go through the nature, the nurture and the technology. We'll be exploring what it is that makes the physicality of a phenom.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is a delightful first introduction to Dr. Kim again. Thanks for being on. So why don't you reread that question that we just left off, Gary?

• 17:30Gary O'Reilly?

  For sure. Right, just before the break, we hit on a question from Josh V from Patreon. Do professional sports teams study a player's genetics when evaluating their roster acquisitions? And I think. With just the recent NFL draft, that is probably what is in this contributor's mind.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure that no NFL teams are doing this this type of thing. Um, because there's a collective bargaining agreement for all the professional sports in the United States. And so the first thing that would happen is, um, the lawyers for the collective bargaining agreement would veto it. And it's just, it's not in our collective bargaining agreement, we're not going to give you the genetic information. But I'm also sure that European teams do that because they don't have the collective bargaining agreement. And they're allowed to test their their players for, um, certain genetic markers.

• 18:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so very important what you just said there, Stuart, because your AxGen specializes in

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in predictive information about whether an athlete will become injured. And the value of a player in the draft to me, as owner of the team, is not just are you a good player, but can you, can you avoid injury? You're no good to me on the bench. So clearly that's going to be really important going down the line.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  So I, I agree. So let me describe like the upside of this. It it should be a win-win-win situation, right? So the owners should like this because their players don't get hurt. They have more guys playing in the championship, they win more Super Bowls. Coaches should like this because the players don't get hurt. Players should like this because they don't get hurt. They get more stats in their career, they win more Super Bowls. So everybody should have an incentive to do this. And the reason it gets shut down is because of, you know, you could have negative contract negotiations. If you have risk for injury, then you're not a hundred million dollar quarterback, you're eighty million dollar quarterback, right?

• 19:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and even though you may, just because you have a marker for risk for injury, doesn't mean you're going to be injured. So you're you're penalized for something, you're penalized for something that may not happen.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Might not happen. And these markers are, you know, they're statistics. So doesn't mean you're going to get hurt. And first off, you know, from all of the people we've talked to, coaches, players, they care about performance. And risk of injury, that's, that's there, it's important, but it's not what they're really making decisions on. So the solution is to have everybody agree that, well, if a team, Dallas Cowboys comes to Action and say, "We want to test our players," then the first thing that's going to happen is that the players' unit is going to shut that down, and the Dallas Cowboys would not be allowed to do that. And Action would have, we have our privacy thing, and if players don't allow it, the

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Dallas Cowboys can know the information, then they're not going to know the information. So that's all secure. The solution could be that the Dallas Cowboys say, "It's a win-win-win situation. We're going to let our players get tested. We're going to let the players know what they're in," and the players all have a personal trainer. Not a Dallas Cowboys trainer, but a personal trainer. They use, like LeBron has his own personal trainer. So the player and his own personal trainer could get together and do the extra training to prevent the injury. Now, the player doesn't get hurt, the contract doesn't get changed, the team wins, so this

• 21:14Speaker 02

  could be a good investment for the Dallas Cowboys, um, and to preserve the confidentiality for the players. So that looks like a way forward until, looks like the bargaining agreement gets renegotiated, and then we'll see what those guys decide, you know, they want to do with genetic testing in sports.

• 21:32Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 21:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to emphasize something you just said, because it seemed to me to be the most important fact. So it's not that you're damaged goods if you have risk of injury, it's that knowing you have risk of a particular kind of inju- injury enables you to mitigate against, uh, being susceptible to that when you engage in the sports.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. So Action stands for actionable.

• 21:54Chuck Nice?

  Right. Even then, though, you have to make sure that you have the right training regimen, because people can over-train and they can train to prevent injury, which leads to another type of injury. So, you know, by strengthening an area of your body, uh, in such a way that you're trying to prevent injury, you may weaken another area of your body and actually cause injury to happen there. So there's so many ways that, you know, this has to be balanced, that, you know, if I were a player, I, and if I were an elite player, I would say, "I'm already an elite player. I'm not giving you any more information than you already have on me."

• 22:37Chuck Nice?

  If I were a Midland player, I would say, okay, maybe we can do this because I might be able to bump something up, you know, if I improve my own performance, or if I find a way to be better, then I might end up making more money. So I think it's gonna, you know, it would be more individualistic if I'm the player, I'm going to be a little bit more reticent to give up information depending on what kind of player I am.

• 23:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Elite athletes will go for this if they know they're protected.

• 23:09Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yeah. That's the answer. I have nothing, listen, if I'm not protected, I have, all I could do is lose. If I'm an elite athlete.

• 23:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  If I'm an elite athlete and you don't have safety valves in this situation for me, all I can do is lose. I mean, it doesn't, you know, because I'm already winning, so.

• 23:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Doctor, when you say about there are certain markers you can test for, can you sort of expand on what those markers might be? I think things like bone density and stuff like that I might see as a bit of a given, but there must be some other ones that you would go to to see.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Well, there are lots of other ones, and there are more coming down the pipe. Bone density is our strongest test because it's crazy strong. And bone density, like low bone density, is the biggest risk factor for stress fractures. Stress fracture is the biggest risk injury for endurance runners. So they work out, they run twice a day, and they don't fully heal in between workouts, so eventually they get a stress fracture. And it's preventable because it's a repetitive use injury. And so just something simple like biomechanics, running on softer turf, it can prevent a stress fracture. It's a perfect storm. It's preventable, and it happens a lot, and there's genetic, strong genetic information about

• 24:30Speaker 02

  risk for stress fractures. Well, that's a really good one. It's so good that it's not only going to be used for athletes, but soon it should be used for osteoporosis. Because low bone mineral density is also called osteoporosis. So not athletes, but old guys, old people are worried about osteoporosis.

• 24:51Chuck Nice?

  All right. Gary, let's go to another question. I'm gonna go to this one, guys. You got one. Yeah. You both got questions. Yeah, we both, that's, yeah, Neil, that's how we normally do this show, believe it or not.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They never give me any questions. I never have anything.

• 25:06Chuck Nice?

  Now, I want to follow up on what we just talked about because there's a really interesting question from JC. He's also a Patreon patron. And he says, hi, guys. In an evolutionary perspective, how can you explain the great athleticism that black people have? Is there something in their genes that makes them more athletic by default? I am a big NBA fan, and it's always fascinating to me to that the sport is dominated by athletic and

• 25:37Chuck Nice?

  awesome black dudes. So, Doc, is there a racial component to athletic genetic performance? Or genetic athletic performance?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know, because it's easy. It's easy to come to the wrong conclusion about this all things about races. Because you could also say like Asians can't swim, or what else? Can't do skiing, you know, that they don't win gold medals in skiing. Except they do now, right? So the, all of a sudden Asians decided to train for these aerial, aerial flips. And now a bunch of Asians are doing well because they just decided to do it. And so, you know, you don't see, you didn't see many blacks play tennis player back in the day. And now you read tons of African Americans playing. And it was just because they didn't have tennis courts in their neighborhood. They had basketball courts

• 26:41Speaker 02

  in their neighborhood. So, I don't know. You know, I don't know if it's nature or nurture and that sort of thing. And you can, you know, Africans are taller than Asians. Just look at the average height. So there's got to be something to it. Basketball is better to be called. So there's probably something, but it's just, it's something as simple as that. But I'd say, you know, training is a really big effect, too.

• 27:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think Chris, one of Chris Rock's more famous observations, which was completely hilarious. He says, "Something's wrong with the world." This was maybe 15 years ago, he was able to say this, "Something's wrong with the world. How is it that the best rapper is white, the best basketball player is Chinese, and the best golfer is black?"

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny. Yeah, that was funny. So we had... That's a funny joke, damn. Of course, Tiger Woods, and we had... Yao Ming. Yao Ming, and you had the guy from Detroit. Eminem.

• 27:50Chuck Nice?

  Eminem.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So to your point, Dr. Kim. Yeah. We had another question.

• 27:58Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, this from Eric Vager on StarTalk Facebook. "Is there availability of genetic testing for professional athletes that could predict the possible susceptibility of concussions?"

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Gary O'Reilly?

  For athletes.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  What a great question.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great, yeah. Great cranial fitness.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what, that's what your father always told you. Get your thick head, get your thick head.

• 28:28Gary O'Reilly?

  There's a second part to this question, please. Also, and if it involves a frying pan, I'll laugh my head off. Also, "How close are scientists to developing a genetic therapeutic for healing and possibly reversing concussions?"

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:43Gary O'Reilly?

  So there's a, so there you go. That's an interesting dimension to that question.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  This was not staged, this is true blue, but this week, we developed our first genetic test for concussion. Let me tell you about it. There are two markers for concussion that are crazy strong, and you know, the statistics are really out of this world, that if you have either of these two markers, your risk for concussion goes up something like threefold. And so this one, and there's, there's, they call it pre, prevention is called prehabilitation in this field. So neck strengthening exercises seem to prevent your risk of concussion. So now you're, you know, you were playing soccer as a fifteen year old, if you had, you had this risk for concussion, you could do neck strengthening exercises, you know, a

• 29:32Speaker 02

  few extra a week on top of all these other things. And then now when you get, when you head the ball, you're less likely to get concussion. And so you could mitigate your risk and come up, get closer back to the normal level so that you get to have the career that you did have. So that's the good news. Other thing is that there are helmets for bicyclists and football players that are kind of special, special helmets. And you could start to think about the special helmet. And in soccer, you can wear a headband or something like that to reduce the impact from heading the ball. But also the prehabilitation thing to prevent concussion if you're at increased risk. And we're the only people

• 30:16Speaker 02

  that know about these genetic markers for concussion. It's really good. Wow. Congratulations.

• 30:22Chuck Nice?

  Congratulations. Yeah. How do I invest in your company now? Because, I mean, let's be honest, the, uh, the NFL is gonna need this information.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, now there's the peewee weeks, right? It's like the parents of the kids are gonna want to know this so that their kids, yeah, the NFL players, yeah, they get concussions. That's, that's for sure. It makes a lot more sense for, you know, fourteen year olds so that, you know, they can get into college with a scholarship or the college athlete so that they can get drafted. It works all the way up.

• 30:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. But that, but I mean, ultimately, the NFL benefits, like, for instance, a guy who can either eliminate or greatly mitigate, you know, um, the head injury, um, that's a guy who's gonna have a longer career. I mean, there's some, there's some guys who get to the NFL and their career is cut short, uh, because of not what happened in the NFL, but because of all the damage that was incurred on their way to the NFL.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Plus all the guys that, that you never heard of. You know, that because they got injured and then they just didn't get drafted and, you know, they could have been the next Tom Brady. Tom Brady could have been, wouldn't be Tom Brady if he got hurt. So that's what we're talking about.

• 31:42Chuck Nice?

  Nah, I'm pretty sure Tom Brady would have still been Tom Brady.

• 31:47Chuck Nice?

  I don't know what it is, like, you know, they'd have changed, they'd have changed the whole game. They'd have been like, everybody has to have a concussion now.

• 31:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Quarantine has not affected your hatred for Brady, has it, Chuck?

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's see if we get another question in before the break.

• 32:04Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead, Gary.

• 32:05Gary O'Reilly?

  You wanna go? All right, let's, okay, this is, uh, D'Sin on Instagram. Will humanity ever reach a point where in sports especially, they would just peak and cannot get any better?

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, and we don't have time to answer that. See, I did it again.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna take a break and we're gonna come back for our last segment of StarTalk. Sports edition, cosmic queries on sports performance and genetics with Dr. Stuart Kim. We'll be right back.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're in the middle of some good shit.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry. No, just genetics and sports performance. And we just left off, Gary, with a question. What was it?

• 33:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, this from D'Sin on Instagram, uh, D'Sin322, in case there's more D'Sinners out there. Uh, will humanity ever reach a point where in sports especially, that we just peak and cannot get any better?

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you know, that's come up, uh, you go back. Uh, with the history of the mile. Will anyone ever break the four minute mile? And people were asked, that must be some physical limit. And everybody jumped in to opine on that. And then, once it broke, in fact, I think the race that broke the four minute mile, two or three people broke the four minute mile in that same race. So.

• 33:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Damn.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 33:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Sir Roger Banister was back in the way back then. And I think it was at Oxford, there was a racetrack and it took him six weeks of preparation for a training regime to attack the four minute mile record. And he did so, yeah.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Stuart, what do you know about the limits of human performance? The limits in principle, right? That would just be like the physics of our human body, right? Otherwise, bones start breaking and muscles detach.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Well, I'm going to give you a layperson's answer because I'm, you know, I'm a geneticist. I'm not an athlete, but I'll give you a layperson's answer. Uh, uh, well, I guess I won't. It's the answer is, I don't know, maybe, maybe somebody, let's just say, kid somebody, let's put a number up, can somebody run a three minute mile? Something crazy, right? Um, what is that? What, you could say it's possible, it's not possible. When I was a professor, I used, there was a similar question being asked about longevity. Because I used to study aging before I studied sport. And the question is, can you live to be 200?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  And the most serious and the smartest aging guys had a bet, a million dollar bet, that there is somebody alive that's going to live 200 years. Because longevity keeps on going up, 0.8 years per year. And so you just extrapolate, you just say, somebody's alive today that will live 200 years. So you could say, somebody's alive today that's going to run three minute mile. And you just, you just could plot out, you know, how much low. Or is there a speed limit for the mile? And you can't get faster than something. And that this is the fastest that human tendons and human muscles can go. And I don't know anything about this because I'm a geneticist. But those are the two options.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  There's a speed limit or there is no speed limit. We'll eventually, we'll eventually get there.

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's how I would address that question. I love your candor.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Speed of light, speed of light.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  That tells you about how much they know about this topic.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would get mentioned. You're not running the mile at the speed of light. That will not happen. But I do think you can ask, we can ask ourselves, particularly since you're into genetics. And earlier in the program, we talked about what is your spirit animal, whose genes you might want. I don't think it's out of the question to ask, can I be at least as fast as the fastest mammal? Can I have reflexes as fast as the fastest reflexed other animal? We're all part of the animal kingdom and the tree of life, so.

• 36:46Chuck Nice?

  Except the cheetah has two extra legs than I do.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn those.

• 36:53Chuck Nice?

  And nine legs. And the ability to elongate its spine to, you know, stretch its gait, so.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It coils the spine.

• 37:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh, so it explodes, right.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So for, just in a more serious example, right? We have veterans who have dismembered legs, you know, with prostheses. A newt can regenerate limbs, right? We like to think of ourselves as all up and high and mighty on the tree of life. And you go to a newt that can do things we can't, and it is a vertebrate animal, as are we. So you, Stuart, the geneticist, can you just go in and get the gene for reflexes? And the gene for speed and the gene for this and just graft it into the human to then give us that ability?

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can. So really, really good scientists are studying newts and how they regenerate. And that's leading to lots of ideas about why human neurons don't regenerate, but newt neurons can completely regenerate. And so there are really serious, you know, molecular studies that are going to eventually start to work and be used therapeutically for human, like spinal cord, you know, injuries.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that would work. And while you were talking, I just thought, why would you do genetics? I mean, you know, Blade Runner, the guys that, those guys can run really fast if they have these.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Different types of blades on their feet instead of feet. And so those guys can run very, very fast. So.

• 38:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, at some point, it might be a combination of your own genetics, but then some type of augmentation. So, you know.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, just to be clear, because we have a very geeky audience. Your reference to Blade Runner was not the film.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  Not the film.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was to, the sprinters, they outfit them with basically a flexible blade.

• 38:59Chuck Nice?

  Oscar Pistorius, yeah.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Among them.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when you run, your downward momentum gets stored. The energy of that gets stored in the blade and then recoils. So it's still all of your own energy. It's just more efficient than your own feet, than your, than your biological feet. So, yes, you're right, Chuck. That's kind of an augmentation of what that would be. Okay, so what you're saying, Stuart, is that there's still a chance we will have a three-minute mile and just be run by somebody who doesn't look anything human at all.

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  That's cool.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, next question.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  All right. Radim Zidik, or Zidik, Radim Zidik from Facebook says this. If you could choose one sport to excel in through genetic enhancement, what would it be? And I think a better, or just to stretch that out, what sport would benefit most from genetic enhancement? Because I mean, that would be, that would be the sport you want to play, you know, would be the one that, that would benefit most from genetic enhancement.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  And genetic enhancement, this is sometime in the future where I can prosper in genetic changes.

• 40:11Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  And even these animal genes, like I could be a cheetah. Well, so I think all four of us should think about this. It could be, like, what'll, what'll make me the richest? Then I'll just try, like, a cheetah gene. Well, I'd want to be, uh, what's, I'd want a reflex gene so I could hit a fastball, because baseball plays a lot.

• 40:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, that's a good one.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Another answer would be, what would just be the funnest thing to do? And you could say, I want, you know, some sort of a gene that lets me climb to the top of Everest with no face mask, with no gas mask, or I could just...

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Hold my breath like a seal. And then, uh, you know, they understand pretty well why a seal can go down and not breathe for whatever thirty minutes. And, you know, I would just put in the Myoglobin, seal Myoglobin, so my muscles don't need any oxygen for thirty minutes. Then I would just go scuba diving, not scuba diving, snorkeling, except I could go down for thirty minutes and look at all the corals. So, you know, that would be the funnest thing to do. It'd be, you know, for me, it'd be funner than being a baseball player, but I wouldn't make any money about it.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Those are my two.

• 41:26Chuck Nice?

  You just picked something that's gonna cost you money.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Well, what would you choose?

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, for me, I'm a, I'm a sports purist, and so I'm, I'm a very deep, um, I deeply embrace the Olympic motto, faster, higher, stronger. In each of those categories, you can set a world record. So if the Olympics were as pure as its motto, you would have no team sports, and you would have no sports that were, uh, involved judges, that where they score you at the end. So, uh, if you're, have genetic enhancements, you would run faster, jump higher, you know, faster, higher, stronger, you'd be stronger. And then you can have objective measures of how far humans have come in those realms.

• 42:14Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. See, I'm going with something that, uh, like a gazelle, like reflex, so that I can stop and move, and I'd just be the greatest tennis player of all time.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 42:25Chuck Nice?

  Because it's an individual sport, and the endorsements are amazing, so.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Gary, how about you?

• 42:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Enhanced vision.

• 42:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so I can, I, I, my field of vision, my peripheral vision, my foveal vision, my ability to read every single stitch on a fastball, curveball, slider, whatever you got, I'm seeing it. And then I can see during a game, I see movement, I have, I mean, I'm, I'm gonna upgrade my improved vision with pattern recognition software of some kind.

• 43:05Chuck Nice?

  Except the problem is, you're gonna be walking around like with giant eyes, because all the, all the animals that have that kind of vision, they all have big giant eyes.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Mary, I I track this from time to time. So our vision is limited by the number of cones and photoreceptor cells we have in our eyes. So think of it like, um, you know, a camera chip. And we we're at like four hundred K or something like that. And eagle has more receptors per unit area than we do. They can see much better. So their resolution is higher because they have more pixels at the back of their eyes. All we have to do is figure out why does an eagle have more pixels than a human? And then your eyesight, there's no physical limit why your eyesight has to max out at twenty ten. And why couldn't you just get eagle eyesight?

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence the phrase, we've got eagle eyes.

• 44:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Eagle eyes, yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's it's biologically justified to make that such a claim.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got time for one more question?

• 44:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, okay. So this, yeah, I'll I'll grab this one. This is from Cochrane, I think it's Richard on Instagram, directed to Stuart. I work out hypertrophy, and I'm also a certified personal trainer. My question to you, is there any way to surpass or alter someone's genetic potential when it comes to physical strength and or endurance without the use of hormones?

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Well, let's think about this. So you want to genetically alter, what could you do? You could, um,

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gain muscle. When you gain muscle.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  You could do CRISPR. You're not allowed to do CRISPR. So that that answer is no. You could do a transplant. You know, you could transplant in somebody else's organ or cells. Uh, that's sort of like genetically altering your your potential. Uh, I guess. I mean, I think the answer is no. Uh, if it's genetic alteration, there's no way now. It's theoretically possible, but it's not it's not available, you know, yet.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, but let me offer a corollary to this. So let's take, uh, who's the guy that won a gazillion gold medals in swimming? Um, In the Olympics. Phil.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Michael Phelps.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah Phelps. Yeah, Michael Phelps. Phelps. Okay. So, let's take Michael Phelps for an example. You can have people study his body and they'll say he's a physical specimen for swimming. You could say all of that. But at the end of the day, he's in the pool for 16 hours a day. Okay. So, so, so he has motivation to train.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, you can have whatever genetic potential to perform that your profile tells you.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you're a deadbeat on the couch.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  None of that will get realized.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in your, in your world, is anyone talking about motivation?

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a gene for that?

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. So, we talk about this all the time. You know, if you could figure out all the elite athletes versus all the normal guys, and figure out what's the genetic difference between those two guys, are you gonna find a muscle gene or a brain gene?

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I bet it's a brain gene.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Brain gene. My guys, you know, I've got guys that are world-class volleyball players and NFL players and, and, and national record holders and endurance runner. They all come back and say it's the brain. You know, they, they had the drive and the determination. And knowing them, I can get it. Cause they, these guys have drive to get up every morning and exercise and keep on going even when it hurts. And, and that's not something that I would do. So, they all say it's the brain that got somewhere they, they are. Anybody with a normal muscle could get there as long as you had the crazy kind of drive to be an elite athlete. So, we'll see. You know, maybe this world-class athlete is up here and you gotta have the drive to

• 47:11Speaker 02

  just want it or not care if it hurts, something like that.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's on a whole other level from whether or not you get nervous at high-profile competitions. That's a whole other thing.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? That's, that's how steady you are and how focused you are. Separate from whether you're waking up every morning at 6:00 AM to...

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. We all, we also talk about doing the, uh, sports choking experiment, right? You take all the guys that think the free throw when the, and all guys who can't... Hit a free throw and a fourth quarter comeback, not come back and try to figure out like they're they're about the same athletically, but one wins and the other one usually loses. What's that is change. And, uh, you know, we talk about doing that experiment someday.

• 48:00Gary O'Reilly?

  We did explore that, didn't we? Where there's a certain part of the brain, is it that, um, the only one I've got coming up is hippocampus and you dial, you can dial up and dial down the activity within there and it's that allows you to just go routine.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Boom, boom, wow.

• 48:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Boom. Yeah. And it's, and the psychologists work with athletes, elite athletes to train exactly these things within their own brains to get this performance level up.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, you and I did something similar to this, uh, on set in another show where I forgot the theme, but we, we had to stick our hand in a bucket of ice and see how long it was.

• 48:39Chuck Nice?

  It was about pain tolerance and.

• 48:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pain tolerance. I just knew that I could just do that. Right. I just knew based on pains that I've experienced, this would be nothing based on the stuff that I've been through in my life. I, I used to wrestle, um, uh, intercollegiate wrestling and there's a lot of pain.

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I think I, I beat you in that, I think was.

• 49:00Chuck Nice?

  I don't think, I know you beat me in it because guess what? My, my life is not based on how much pain I am able to withstand. That is not one of the criteria that, or criterion that I, that I use to measure my life. As a matter of fact, my life is actually predicated upon how much leisure I'm able to withstand.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole other, that's a, that's a, that's a different genetic.

• 49:30Chuck Nice?

  Another gene, baby.

• 49:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, do you remember, remember just recently we did a show with the NFL legend Tony Gonzalez?

• 49:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Gary O'Reilly?

  And he was, he was talking to you about how the fact that he missed only a handful of games in his 17 year career. And one time he had a bone or something sticking out of his shoulder and it never bothered him? Doctor, doctor, I mean, there, there must be markers for that. And can we have some, please?

• 50:01Chuck Nice?

  You, let me just say, Gary wants some. I'll, I'll stay as I am. I don't, I don't want to walk around and have somebody go, "Hi, did you know your leg was broken?" I don't need that in my life. I don't need that.

• 50:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So we, we're running out of time. So Dr. Stuart Kim, leave us with some thoughts and some wisdom on where you are and where you think this will all land in the coming years.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Well, the first thought is what Gary just asked me because all I can tell you is we have a secret project with Axum. I can't reveal it to your listeners right now, but sometime in the future.

• 50:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We won't tell anybody. We, we won't tell anybody.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  And so I'm dying to tell you about our secret. It's so cool. Uh, once we get a little bit further on with it. And we, today we talked about a lot of stuff that's really not possible. You're, listen, it's got to understand that, you know, like putting in cheetah genes. I mean, nobody thinks that's possible, but it's fun to think about. But there really is new scientific data that we have. We're providing an edge to elite athletes that, you know, should be able to benefit them by helping them not get injured so that they can progress to become elite athletes and, and stay in their sport.

• 51:18Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 51:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's a, that's an important dimension in the future of athletic competition. And good to see that you're on top of that. And, uh, and one day we will take a tour of your basement, whether you like it or not.

• 51:32Chuck Nice?

  Where we, where we will get to see the first, the first prototype of LeBron James.

• 51:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, we gotta end it there. Dr. Kim, thank you for sharing your time with us. And we'll definitely come back to you. Gary, as always. Thank you. Definitely. Chuck, uh, Chuck Nice Comic, as always. As always. I tweeted Neil Tyson, and of course, that's who I am. I'm your personal astrophysicist. Thanks for joining us. As always, I bid you to keep looking.