Scientists and Doping II

So, in the previous post, I was talking about how the concept of doping for scientists was a very unpleasant thought, and how it was unethical to a certain degree. Now, I shall continue where I left off due to a lack of time.

The idea of performance enhancement has always been around in human societies. Operating under the guise that people are in essence agents who wish to advance self-interest, it becomes even clearer why this is so. Things like rote practice to improve test grades, sleeping enough before exams, and even going for tuition are pretty much part and parcel of daily life. We accept these performance enhancing steps as such because it requires expending a certain amount of effort in order to attain them; there is an opportunity cost incurred in their use. Time that is spent on rote practice, for instance, is time that could be used to train in swimming. As such, while we might not like the fact that there are people who are doing better than us, we do not harbour any stronger sentiment because we know that they have essentially made a tangible trade-off of sorts.

Now, the advent of technology has created a whole new class of performance enhancers—drugs. The difference between using a drug as a performance enhancer and what we outlined above lies in the fact that the use of drugs does not create a tangible enough trade-off. The performance enhancing drug has opportunity costs that are not measured by time, and time is almost the single leveller across all classes of people. Thus, with the drugs, it is possible to do much more with shorter time, as opposed to the "natural" way where actual time has to be traded into obtaining the outcomes that we want.

While it is clear in recent years that frequent drug use can cause an altered physiology that is more susceptible to various injuries due to the artificially elevated levels of certain homeostatic components, people are less inclined to be worried about that due to the potential long term power/financial gains. Think about this scenario: so an athlete uses steroids to enhance body muscle and wins multiple gold medals in Olypmic-level events. Usually, such feats will lead to lucrative business deals like product endorsements, or even prize money from the sports councils/departments of the countries that they come from. Thus, even if at the end the said athlete needs to undergo medical treatment to correct the physiological problems that occur from the drug use, it would still be worthed it, since he/she has the ability to do so now. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that the athlete leaves at the height of his/her career and then keeps a low profile. And for this reason, we ban drug use in sports because of the unfair advantage in the short term, since all that we care about in sports is really the here and the now; no one cares about who broke the world record 3 years ago if the world record has been beaten 6 times since then.

Now, in the intangible world of intellectual discourse and invention, it is even harder to measure the amount of power/financial gain that one gets through an elevated performance from drug use. While Flowers for Algernon explores a scenario where the drug used can increase intellectual capacity for the short term but cause deleterious effects in the long term, it is not something that is shown to be completely true in the real world. There are probably much larger trade-offs in the realm of intellectual pursuits, but we do not get to see them as clearly as that of sports. But what we do know is that scientists are essentially walking brains, and if these brains are artificially enhanced by drugs, we are uncertain of their long term effects.

Where should the line be drawn between "natural" and "artificial" substance-based enhancements?

[Ed: I started on this 2 days ago, but I got sidetracked by real work, and thus produced this rather shoddy argument for now—just wanted to get this out the way for now.]