Making a Phenom: Genetics

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.

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 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, Jack. Nice, Jack.

• 0:38Chuck Nice?

  Hey, hey, hey, Neil. Yes.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, really good comedian. And I guess I'll call you an actor now? You're acting and stuff?

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah. I mean, I've always, you know, I've been acting.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've always.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  I've been acting like a comedian for God knows how long.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My longtime co-host for StarTalk. And we've got Gary O'Reilly. Gary.

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, Neil.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. We're calling "The Making of a Phenom." What does that require? What combination of training? You know, did you drink milk as a child? Just, is there any, you know, what are the secrets? So Gary, I think you primarily thought up this mini-series of StarTalk Sports Editions. So what did you have in mind for it?

• 1:33Gary O'Reilly?

  I want the house, the wives, and the, is this guy for real reasons? Behind the making and breaking of a phenom.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, 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.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  It was a division of Penguin Random House called Current.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, nice. And you've also written and reported for ProPublica and Sports Illustrated. All right, very cool. Maybe we can ask about the the cover effect that we've all heard about.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Fair enough, okay.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Athletes get. So how did you end up covering sports genetics?

• 2:51Speaker 03

  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, Jamaican immigrant, first in his family, who was gonna go to college and all these things. And I was devastated by it.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what was his age group? Eighty?

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Eighty. No, that's why if it had been eighty, I wouldn't have been so surprised by it. Teen. So, and eventually I had his family sign a waiver allowing me to gather his medical records, sort of investigated what happened. It turned out he had the disease called 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 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

• 3:57Speaker 03

  that's in fact, what happened. I became the science writer at Sports Illustrated. And that started my interest in genetics.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, they're a great athlete. They're at the top of their game. Are there other athletes that also dropped 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 manifests when the body is particularly stressed for being the best at in a sport?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  No, in fact, most of the deaths are high school 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, a Bears player, both dropped dead. The 49ers player was named Thomas Harian and, you know, 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, 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, it's usually just a typical high school athlete.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. That's, that's so sad. Right, right. Where the first indication of your illness is death. Is death, yeah. That's, that's, that's wrong. That's wrong on every level. Every level.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  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 it's, so I thought there was some important reasons for more recognition.

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, Chuck, what do you have for them?

• 5:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. Um, when researchers started to look at the sort of gene variants, David, they looked at sort of actin3, uh, which is the, the sort of fast twitch, slow twitch, you know, your aerobic and aerobic efficiency, pain threshold, height, all these different sort of variants. Have there been a, you know, sort of identified sports gene? You've got to have one of these if you want to be able to succeed.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  No. So the, 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 actin3. It's, it's found in, you know, 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.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  But other than that, it doesn't have any predictive value for you. 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.

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so David, why do you have a job?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Well, I wrote my book about sports genetics, everything I thought was known, and then I moved on to doing different stuff.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's it, there you go.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  There won't be a sequel, I don't think.

• 7:15Chuck Nice?

  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?

• 7:23Speaker 03

  So, let me go back to that, I talked about sudden deaths. 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. You know, 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 2/3 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.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was articulately put, I think, if I could restate what you said, just so I make sure I understand it. There's certain variations where you need a large population to show all the ways it manifests. And it 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?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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 was, we could just basically throw out. I mean, it was useful because we learned that like the motto for genetics, I think, should be genetics more complicated than we expected.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  A lot of promises that.

• 9:28Chuck Nice?

  It's like a face. It's like a Facebook status.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's complicated.

• 9:34Chuck Nice?

  It's complicated.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:47Chuck Nice?

  And is there any, 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, you know, large data sets, you might be able to extrapolate and see where mutations and how mutations happen.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  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, you know, into a mouse or something like that to study it. And, you know, you have to be careful with things there, too. But, but there are those.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want, I want T-Rex.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Engineering the mutation into a T-Rex to make it especially cool.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  You end up with pinky in the brain. That'd be great.

• 10:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, well. David, at the moment, in this coronavirus, we're all sit 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 of 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.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  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, 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, you know, he went to college and obviously became, became a great player. Scottie Pippen was the manager of his college team. He graduated high school at 6'1", started as the team manager at Central Arkansas, you

• 12:12Speaker 03

  know, and then sprouted to, you know, about seven inches in like his, his junior year. Jordan was a little bit earlier. He had a growth spurt late in high school. He, 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, but he was 5'7", 5'8". So all these guys had these very late growth spurts that I think testify to the fact that, you know, the skill, of course, is important, but, 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, 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.

• 12:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:03Chuck Nice?

  And Yanis is also working with, you know, team trainers. So he's gotten bigger.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 13:10Chuck Nice?

  He's not, he's not only grown because he was a, basically a child when he came into the NBA. I mean, he's, he's a kid. But he's not only grown, but you know, working with these trainers, he's grown width wise.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:22Chuck Nice?

  And height wise. So, and that's, that's gotta be, you know, something. I had the exact opposite, David. In high school, I was six eight and then in college, in college, I'm five 10. So.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  That happens. You regress to the mean of height, you know.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That happens. And tell me about body type. There's a lot of talk about, oh, they're too, they're, remember we used to have words for that ectomorph and endomorph or there was some vocabulary to describe it and people always trying to use this way to classify people so they can pass judgment as to whether they will or will not succeed.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Sort of the original judgments that I went back to in my research anyway, sort of early in the 20th century. Sports science was, it's called physical education science at the time was dominated by German science, pre-World War II. And they had, 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, was like an aberration. And, you know, there for, for obvious reasons, their influence became less. And I think sports scientists and coaches and athletes realized that instead of this

• 14:38Speaker 03

  perfect form and everything else being an aberration, you actually sort of want body types that fit into, 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 where height is 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 percent. 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.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  And so you've seen this, what these two Australian researchers called 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, so I think we've seen, these aren't, these aren't aberrations, they're just more fit for one sporting niche than another. And this, this continues, this, this sort of flying apart of body types in different sports.

• 15:52Chuck Nice?

  I just love the, 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.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Well, you know, you get it, it was, they, they had, they had a not surveilled agenda, right? And, and I think that's one of the reasons it was so interesting to see when they, they hosted the Olympics and said, you know, we're going to show the race that's sound of body and mind. And Jesse Owens came in and rained on that parade.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 16:39Chuck Nice?

  Way to bring us down, Neil.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keeping it real.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Now that we've talked about sudden death and Nazis like where anybody else got anything downbeat?

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, could you hang around a little bit and come back in the third segment when we shoot the shit?

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Absolutely. This is talking about the stuff is my idea of fun. Let's do it.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Thanks. We got to take a quick 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 to deeper into this question of the role of genetics in sports when StarTalk returns.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition, the future of sports genetics.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've got with me, of course, Gary O'Reilly, Chuck Nice into segment two. There's no end to this, just so you know.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, we have to bring back on one of our friends of StarTalk, Dr. Stuart Kim. Stuart, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 18:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay. So you're not, you're not recoding them?

• 18:32Speaker 04

  No.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't go into a back room and come back out, you know, as Captain America, right? So 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.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, eighty percent 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.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  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

• 19:28Speaker 04

  from my genome, except that you're derived from Europe and not derived from Korea. I'm pretty sure we couldn't figure out anything about, you know, Michael Phelps or LeBron James from their genomes. Yeah. 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 are 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.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Stuart, are you saying just by looking at Gary, you know he's injury prone?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  No, but looking at his DNA, I could find out, you know, so.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, that's cold, that's cold.

• 20:25Chuck Nice?

  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, all right? It's a repetitive motion.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:42Chuck Nice?

  I mean, I'm going to get it if I play tennis.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:45Chuck Nice?

  Like, it's very, very common.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:47Chuck Nice?

  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, you know, my training and the fact that I rest? Like, what is it?

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's all of those Chuck. I mean, if you have bad form, you're gonna, 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're, 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.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is, this is a tailor-made practice regimen for the athlete. So that's a very important cog in this wheel, isn't it?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Oh, exactly right. And so an example would be, we're working with cross-country teams, and there's a 62% risk of, 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, you know, half your team is out because of this stress fracture. Takes just a couple of 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

• 22:35Speaker 04

  kind of avoid stress fracture. Just look at biomechanics and move some of the aerobic exercise away from impact and, you know, over to the elliptical or something like that. Or triathlete, you know, they can just bike or swim more instead of run more. It's, 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, you know, 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

• 23:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  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, and then you're like, everything goes white.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:50Chuck Nice?

  Right? And then all of a sudden.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, this is your origin story.

• 24:00Chuck Nice?

  But.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck wasn't, Chuck wasn't funny before then.

• 24:04Chuck Nice?

  And then he became a great comedian. And it's so funny because, uh, you know, I came in the house and I was a little disoriented. And, um, my, 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, that boy's head is harder than calculus. Ain't nothing wrong with him.

• 24:32Chuck Nice?

  So, 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?

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuart, Stuart, you have to begin your answer by saying, Chuck, let me get this into your thick head.

• 24:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go Chuck.

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  You brought back so many memories for me.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go, Stuart.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  Well, uh, the good news is that it's preventable. It turns out that if you, neck strengthening exercises are good ways to reduce your chance of getting concussion. So like if, uh, Chuck, if you were to have this increased risk for concussion, uh, you could, you know, before you could just exercise your neck, strengthen that and, uh, reduce risk. There's also fancy helmets that you can wear in bicycling and football to try to reduce, uh, your risk of concussion. You know, if you play football, there's, there's gonna 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 these, this concussion genetics

• 25:47Speaker 04

  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 gene gives you a risk for concussion. But those, 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.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 26:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Doctor, you've just made me think, right?

• 26:52Gary O'Reilly?

  There's this question, can man run any faster than Usain Bolt has run in the 100 meters? Right? 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 than Usain Bolt?

• 27:37Speaker 04

  We do. So how to make you run faster?

• 27:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Instead of running faster performance, can we, 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?

• 27:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the way to think about this is Andrew is a guy that works in, with me in AxGen. 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 gonna win.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  And that's the way to, 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 trained the whole time instead of taking a month off to recover. And only, 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 let you, made you go into the hospital in first place. That's what I relay back.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's terrific. You know, and this.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm just asking you about humans, it's one thing to avoid injury, then when you are injured.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What can, what can you do to come back as fast as possible? Is that another genetic fix?

• 29:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. And now that we're starting to know the, what causes you to get, you know, injured, we're gonna 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 concussion, do they, should they take a longer time to come back?

• 30:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because I think some, I read some research a couple of years ago when the, when it was really all the rage, talking about the traumatic brain injuries and what, one of the things that was discussed was the fact that having a concussion makes it easier for you to have a concussion.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:25Chuck Nice?

  So like, that's the big deal. So that, 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.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And so that's why it's really important to prevent the first injury. So once you get injured, 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.

• 31:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  And, and so you see that happening a lot. You want to avoid that first injury because then you're always injured. And then-

• 31:15Chuck Nice?

  Funny you say that because it was not just Kevin Durant, which was the worst, but Klay Thompson-

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:22Chuck Nice?

  And, and the greatest shooter of all time.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Steph Curry.

• 31:27Chuck Nice?

  Steph Curry, thank you. And Steph Curry. All three of them, 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.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but this, this series, this sub-series of StarTalk Sports Edition is focusing on phenoms. And what I want to know from you, Stuart, is you're giving statistics of, you know, 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?

• 32:08Speaker 04

  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. In Delian genetics, you know, 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. It's com- it's, they call it quantitative genetics or complex genetics. I'll give you an example. Height. Your, your height is determined by your genetics.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  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-

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or at least one ten thousandth of your height.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If there's 10,000-

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah, yeah. So I'm talking to a physicist. So physicist says infinitesimal is a lot smaller than a biologist thinking infinitesimal.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wouldn't be infinitesimal if there's 10,000 of them.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, yeah, so.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what that means is there's not this G- that means there's not this gene for height. It's more complicated than that.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  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, that's about the only case I know.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who, who is this? Who is this?

• 33:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, David Epstein talked about him.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, it's, it's in his book. His name is Iro Mayanta Tyarantyanta.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:00Gary O'Reilly?

  He's a Finnish Olympic gold medal cross-country skier.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. It's that guy.

• 34:04Gary O'Reilly?

  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. Um, he has something, the gene was, allowed him to create something like 60% more-

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:19Gary O'Reilly?

  -red blood cells-

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:20Gary O'Reilly?

  -in his system.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Which is, for a cross-country skier, oh yeah, that's the Klondike. His body is blood doping.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, exactly. When you blood dope, uh, one of the ways to do it is to inject EPO, uh, which stands for erythropoietin. And this guy had, like-

• 34:41Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not illegal, even though he's doped up?

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, they had to go to court and he eventually proved uh uh himself uh that it was a natural mutation. And so they allowed him to compete. And so he has uh sky high levels of uh red blood cells. But he's the only one.

• 35:06Chuck Nice?

  Well, what about what about something like as something as simple as testosterone? Because testosterone levels in men are genetically determined.

• 35:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:16Chuck Nice?

  Your level of testosterone is going to cause a lot of different physiological changes in your body.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:24Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, is is it 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?

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Hmm, 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 we can actually predict how much testosterone you have pretty well. But it takes us 9,000 different genes to do so. And, you know, and and as an athlete, you really want to know your level of testosterone because it's it's it really determines your performance.

• 36:10Chuck Nice?

  So is that an unfair advantage that is fair? I mean.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good point, that's a good way to say it, yeah.

• 36:17Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  So this guy is more muscular, he's bigger, he's, you know, all these things. I mean, he has an unfair, fair advantage.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Well, you just hit on a really interesting philosophical question, which is, are all men created equal?

• 36:45Speaker 04

  And you know, we you 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.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not NASCAR where every car is functionally identical.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not like that.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The race is really between drivers.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is track and field for everyone with this level of testosterone. And by the way, then you 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 future.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  It's an 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.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 38:05Chuck Nice?

  You know what, though? In a way, we already do that. Because think about it. You have Pee-wee 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.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting that the very best college team there ever was, they get the worst professional team would wipe their ass with...

• 38:34Chuck Nice?

  Annihilate them.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 38:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And I hate when people try to have that argument.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's not. There is no argument.

• 38:40Chuck Nice?

  There's no argument. I hate when guys are just like, no, you know, the the the 1985 Tigers, Clemson Tigers, would definitely have been able to beat the Detroit Lions. And it's like, shut up. Shut up.

• 38:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Doctor, before you go...

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we gotta, we gotta land this plane.

• 38:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Please, before, before, before we circle the airport, um... 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?

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going to answer for him. Just give it to AI and they'll figure it out.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  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 so big.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 39:50Speaker 04

  The smaller the effect of an individual locus is.

• 39:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then the bigger your data set needs to be.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dr. Kim, it's great to have you on now your second appearance on StarTalk.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  I'm so proud.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we warned you we'd come back to you and we did, and this will not be the last for sure. We're going to come out of this segment and 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.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 in 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.

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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's 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 analyzing it, saying, "This is very inefficient, because the 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.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 in the center of it." 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.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So inspiration somehow doesn't show up in the equations people are trying to put on the table.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, 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 some crazy short interval of time that he does this. And, and then, from then on, American black runners have dominated the sprints from then onward.

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I think to myself, inspiration has got to matter more than genetics, given what I see here.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  It's hugely important. And to think of your running example, I mean, I think one thing that gets at is that sports enthusiasts hearing nonstop chatter and commentary about nature and nurture and 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, every sporting event you watch and nobody, and they haven't dug into any of the literature. And so, for example, with that, that runner you mentioned, who were, 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.

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's interesting. So people are, people can be inventive with their own body form and body type.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In ways that the predictor wouldn't know or think.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  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 and won New York shortly after having a baby, she has the best running economy ever measured in a lab for a woman. And the, her form looks horrible, like one of her legs wings around, she bobs her head all over the.

• 45:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, maybe that's her.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  That'll be her.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Eight hundred meters?

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the time, it was 600 meters.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That race isn't run anymore, 600 yard, 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.

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 47:11Speaker 03

  So I would say, and I think we can all hope maybe that your father's gym teacher was a genius at reverse psychology.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  Maybe. Probably not, but.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably not, but yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  I think one of the main takeaways for me from reporting this, or 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, not genetically based. And other things that I would have assumed were total just acts of volition, like, like the, the compulsion to train and to be in motion actually have important genetic components. And so I think when we prejudge people, it's almost, it's basically always done by intuition. And, and for me, that reporting that went into the book was a real warning shot not to trust my intuition or others people, other people's intuition about this sort of balance in nature and nurture and who's going to be good at what in, in sports and

• 48:08Speaker 03

  in general.

• 48:09Chuck Nice?

  And speaking of what Neil just said, you know, there's a psychology attached to that you said, like, I, I can, we can only wish that the coach was a, an excellent reverse psychologist. But think about this, um, 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, uh, no, I only say that because, um, you know, uh, 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.

• 48:52Chuck Nice?

  And that includes a guy that we had on this show who designed sneakers for Nike.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:59Chuck Nice?

  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 is like, made me become a better sneaker designer. So what is that? I mean, it's, is, is, I don't, I don't even know what to do with that. Like.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is a, this is one of the issues we're getting to 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? And that, that's a.

• 49:40Chuck Nice?

  Good, very good point. Very good point.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  That's a difficult thing to, that's a very difficult thing to measure.

• 49:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you know what this is called? A sphere of positive influence.

• 49:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 49:51Gary O'Reilly?

  And 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, you keep raising your game. And I think Chuck, you're talking about Dwayne Edwards, who we had on the show.

• 50:09Chuck Nice?

  Dwayne Edwards.

• 50:10Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 50:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he said, 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 gotta go. It's like, that's wild.

• 50:52Speaker 03

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

• 51:25Chuck Nice?

  That's a good point. Yeah, yeah.

• 51:27Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, that then becomes the environment that you allow someone like Michael Jordan to exist in and the boundaries you create. That's, that's something we're going to drill down into in the, the rest of this series on occasions.

• 51:39Chuck Nice?

  Let me ask you if you've heard this, maybe you haven't. So I, this, a couple of years ago, I saw this documentary. So I'm, 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 like muscle fatigue. And then they, they, they studied him, then found out that he, his oxygen absorption, like in his cells is off the charts. No matter how long he runs, he just keeps, like his blood cells keep, you know, absorbing oxygen. And is there a way to like?

• 52:24Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 52:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta wanna do it.

• 52:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you gotta wanna 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 wanna do it.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  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 wanna 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 instead of measuring it indirectly, or for speed, right? A stopwatch is a lot better genetic test than ACT and G. But, but yes, you're right, and so we can, in fact, there, there's a study I referenced in the sports gene where in Canada, when they were doing physiological screening for people to be firefighters, out of like 1,500 people, it turned out that six just had this incredible oxygen carrying capacity even though they weren't working out.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  Right, so you find these people, so they were screening for firefighters, but those people pop up. Or one, 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, you can find that, that physiology, and those people tend to be overrepresented in the sports anyway, but I'm sure they'd be more overrepresented if, um, you know, like those, like those firefighters had like the oxygen carrying capacity of

• 54:20Speaker 03

  college runners when they weren't doing anything, basically.

• 54:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So we gotta land this plane. Let me, um, offer a, 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.

• 54:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  That's a, 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, how genes combine differently.

• 55:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good point.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  But, but I do think there are single gene targets we know. So is Aramont Toronto 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, I did this American Life piece about that, 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, you could theoretically design for characteristics even without knowing all of those genes, just by getting these very powerful individual mutations.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  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, 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, you voluntarily accepted, then, then it becomes something more like WWE and, and less like kind of the sports that, that I love, I guess.

• 56:51Chuck Nice?

  That's funny. You call that sports. I call that marriage.

• 56:57Chuck Nice?

  You're in trouble again, Chuck.

• 56:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, trouble again. All right, we got to land the plane right there. Uh, 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, uh, thanks for making this work. And our next feed on 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.