KEY POINTS:
When Henning Wackerhage lined up for last weekend's London Marathon, he had one key advantage over the rest of the race's 48,000 competitors.
The geneticist knows just what it would take for a runner to become fit enough to complete the 42km course in 1 hours - 30 minutes quicker than the world record. Such knowledge suggested we were to get a sensational performance from the researcher from Aberdeen University in Scotland but he dismissed such expectations.
"To run a 1-hour marathon requires not just a rigorous training programme. It also requires the runner to have a very special set of genes. To date, no one on this planet has been found with such a set."
He outlined some of the most important of these genes in a lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine's Marathon Medicine conference in London.
A gene usually comes in more than one variety and these variations can have a crucial impact on the body. A classic example is provided by Eero Mantyranta, the Finnish cross-country skier who won two golds in the 1964 Winter Olympics - a performance that was eventually traced by doctors to his possession of a rare mutation in his EPO-receptor genes that caused him to churn out unusually high levels of red blood cells (which carry oxygen to our muscles and give them power).
Other attributes that would aid marathon runners include elevated levels of glycogen, which stores energy; high muscle mass; and strong hearts and lungs. Again Wackerhage has studied the inherited roots of these and found the genes that play a key role in their development, though most involve research on mice not humans.
One key factor is the gene that controls the production of the PEPCK enzyme. It comes in several variants, one of which produces startling results when mice are genetically engineered with it. They turn into extreme athletes, whizzing round the wheels in their cages for hours.
Hence PEPCK's nickname: the Speedy Gonzales gene.
"Just having the right EPOR and PEPCK variants in a runner would make him or her almost unbeatable," said Wackerhage. There were a minimum of 23 other variants in genes that would lead to dramatic improvements in performances, he said. "It is very unlikely any person possesses all of these or even most of them."
To create a super-runner would require bio-engineering. But such a prospect is dismissed by Wackerhage.
"Attempting this in practice is likely to be either ineffective, because introducing genetic material into muscles is difficult, or it will trigger serious complications that could result in death, or it will be detected by gene tests, leading to disqualification."
So we will have to wait for a while for the super-athlete.
- OBSERVER
