The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (17 page)

Atlas Sports Genetics, of Boulder, Colorado, has made headlines for selling parents an ACTN3 test for their children. According to Kevin Reilly, president of Atlas, the test is particularly useful for “those younger athletes who don’t have the motor skills yet.” By “younger,” Reilly means that just because baby Kobe doesn’t know how to walk yet, that should not mean his DNA can’t begin charting his athletic career. If Kobe has no R versions of the gene, his parents can start nudging their little bundle of DNA toward endurance sports. The genetic-testing-in-diapers market barely materialized for Atlas, but the company did manage a preteen customer base. Says Reilly, “We have had some impact on athletes in the eight-to-ten age group,” in terms of influencing their sport choices.

Unfortunately for those eight-to-ten-year-olds, though, consumer genetic testing for athleticism is nearly worthless.
*
Scientists have
increasingly realized that the inherited component of complex traits, like athleticism, is most often the result of dozens or even hundreds or thousands of interacting genes, not to mention environmental factors. If you are XX for the ACTN3 gene, “you probably won’t be in the Olympic 100-meters,” North says. But you already knew that, without a genetic test. Though the ACTN3 gene does appear to influence sprinting ability, making a sports decision based on it is like deciding what a puzzle depicts when you’ve only seen one of the pieces. You need that piece to complete the puzzle, but you certainly can’t see a meaningful picture without more pieces.

As Carl Foster, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and coauthor of several ACTN3 studies, puts it: “If you want to know if your kid is going to be fast, the best genetic test right now is a stopwatch. Take him to the playground and have him race the other kids.” Foster’s point is that, despite the avant-garde allure of genetic testing, gauging speed indirectly is foolish and inaccurate compared with testing it directly—like measuring a man’s height by dropping a ball from a roof and using the time it takes to hit him in the head to determine how tall he is. Why not just use a tape measure?

All that ACTN3 can tell us, it seems, is who will
not
be competing in the 100-meter final in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. And it is not even doing a very specific job of that, given that it is only ruling out about one billion of the seven billion people on earth.

Still, if only that one gene is taken into account, it is also telling us that there are almost no black people anywhere in the world who are ruled out.

The Warrior-Slave Theory of Jamaican Sprinting

W
elcome home again!” the black scientist says to the white scientist, a Cheshire Cat smile curling around his face.

The black scientist is Errol Morrison, the most renowned medical researcher in Jamaica. “Morrison Syndrome” is a form of diabetes that he linked to indigenous bush teas that some Jamaicans consume in copious quantities. Morrison is so esteemed on the island that once when he was receiving an award for his work, the doctor introducing him joked to the audience that when she traveled abroad people who learned she was from Jamaica would greet her with “Bob Marley!”—unless it was a diabetes conference, in which case they say, “Errol Morrison!”

Morrison is also the president of the twelve-thousand-student University of Technology in Kingston, known locally as UTech. And right now, in late March 2011, he’s joking with the white scientist, Yannis Pitsiladis, a biologist and obesity expert from the University of Glasgow who visits the island regularly and was recently made an adjunct distinguished professor in UTech’s nascent sports science program.

Now the men’s right hands are clasped, and each has his left around the other man’s back. There is a glistening affection between them. They will relax over dinner tonight in Morrison’s airy home, high on a hill, with the Kingston lights just pinpricks below.

But Pitsiladis is in town to work. For a decade now, he has been
traveling here with cotton swabs and plastic containers asking for bits of cheek and gobs of drool from the planet’s fastest men and women. There is no place else on earth where he’s liable, over lunch, to bump into a half-dozen men and women who ran in the Olympic 100-meters. When he does, he will be sure to collect their DNA. (Once, during a chance encounter with a world-class runner at a social function, Pitsiladis hastily sterilized a wineglass for saliva collection.) UTech itself, with its humble, 300-meter grass track, is a hotbed for speed. Sprinters and jumpers who trained at UTech won more medals in track and field (eight) at the Beijing Olympics than dozens of entire countries won in the entire Games.

Over dinner, Morrison and Pitsiladis will talk about their shared scientific goal: untangling the factors, genetic and environmental, that have made a tiny island of three million into the world’s sprint factory. They have put their formidable brains together, and they have published papers together. They have also published separately on the topic in the scientific literature.

And the conclusions of those papers, on the issue of nature-or-nurture, could hardly be more opposite.

•

In his memo pad for work-related expenses, Pitsiladis has a budget line for paying a witch doctor in Jamaica in his quest to get approval to collect DNA from the man’s community. Needless to say, there are few researchers like him in the world.

Pitsiladis’s ancestors left Greece after World War II in search of work, moving first to Australia, and then South Africa. From 1969, when he was two, Pitsiladis lived in the land of apartheid. In 1980, his family returned to Greece, to the island of Lesvos, where he obsessed over training for a career as a professional volleyball player. The future biologist cut school to practice, but when he topped out at 5'10", Pitsiladis surrendered his volleyball dream. Both his previous lives, in South Africa and Greece, can be found embedded in the work he
does now: looking for genes that make the planet’s best athletes, and asking whether one ethnicity has cornered the market on that precious DNA. For a decade, that has meant traveling to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Jamaica, to the training grounds of some of the most endurant and most explosive athletes on earth.

The work has been arduous. Time and again, Pitsiladis has been denied funding to examine the genes of athletes, as research funding for human genetics is generally earmarked for the study of human ancestry or health and disease. So Pitsiladis sustains his academic position at the University of Glasgow by studying the genetics of childhood obesity, a line of inquiry that attracts hefty grants. Pitsiladis’s dean at Glasgow has made a point of telling him to ditch the athlete work and focus on his obesity research. But Pitsiladis is maniacal about his research passion, and obesity genetics is not it.

“I just published a paper on a fat gene,” he says, “but [the gene] has a very small effect, and that can be overcome with physical activity. And we’ll find many more genes, and already I can tell you what the answer will be.” He holds up his thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. He’s indicating that although scientists will find dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of DNA variations that contribute to a predisposition for being overweight, they will all amount to only a small fraction of the explanation for the industrialized world’s obesity epidemic.

It is as if Pitsiladis peels off a dour mask when he switches from discussing obesity genetics to his other work: peering into the genes of the greatest athletes in the world. He occasionally dons a gold and green Ethiopia track-and-field shirt, a gift from an Ethiopian gold medalist, and strands of salt-and-pepper hair bounce off his temples when he gets excited. His eyelids peel back, and his delicate accent, an amalgam of the countries where he has lived, leaps to mezzo-soprano. “My brain never switches off this topic,” he says. “It never stops. Never. I once worked for a year to get one DNA sample! Who else is going to do that?” The answer, in sports science: no one, because there is scant funding for it.

And so Pitsiladis’s sports research must proceed via the bubble gum and duct tape school of science. Since he started visiting Jamaica in 2005, Pitsiladis has paid for much of the work from his own pocket (he remortgaged his home, twice); by collaborating with media (he sold footage from Jamaica to the BBC for a documentary); by partnering with foreign scientists (the Japanese government has carved out a bit of funding for sports genetics); and with a little help from his friends—a 2008 trip to Jamaica was funded by the owner of Pitsiladis’s local Indian restaurant in Glasgow, on the condition that the restaurant owner’s son be allowed to tag along.

This is science at its most wondrously bold and shoestring. And still, for Pitsiladis, getting the funding can be as harrowing as not getting it. He is deathly afraid of flying. His assistant can expect a call prior to every visit to Africa or Jamaica, the man on the other end pleading for the trip to be canceled. But with the help of some vintage red, he always boards.

Not all of his trips to Jamaica have revolved around DNA collection. On the first few visits, Pitsiladis was more of an anthropologist, asking the Jamaican people themselves for their own theories on the secrets of the sprint factory. Answers spanned from the yams they eat to rural children’s habit of chasing animals, to the people’s history of sprinting away from European slave masters. The latter idea may sound silly, but it has origins as deep as the caverns of northwest Jamaica, the locale from which it springs.

Early in his Jamaican ventures, Pitsiladis learned that not only does the island produce an extravagant number of the world’s top sprinters—the national 100-meter record holders for Canada and Great Britain are Jamaican expats, and top American sprinters often have Jamaican roots—but many hail from in and around the tiny parish of Trelawny, in Jamaica’s northwest quadrant. The 2008 Beijing Olympics were the crowning achievement of sixty years of Jamaican sprint success. And the ’08 winners of both the Olympic men’s 100-and 200- and the women’s 200-meter dash—Usain Bolt and Veronica
Campbell-Brown, the premier sprinters of a generation—hail from Trelawny. In the eighteenth century, it became home to a small band of unlikely warriors who descended the sheer limestone cliffs from the thickly layered rain forest of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country into the valleys below to terrorize the most refined soldiers of the world’s most feared military.

It is these Jamaican warriors, Pitsiladis was told, who spawned today’s captains of track and field.

•

On April 3, 2011, one week after his gourmet dinner with Morrison, Pitsiladis is sitting in a chipped plastic chair in a dimly lit concrete room in the rain-forested region of Jamaica that most of the island’s natives have never seen. And he is fighting for his science.

Across a wooden desk that was dragged into place for this meeting is Colonel Ferron Williams, the leader of Accompong Town. Williams is wearing a golden brown short-sleeve button-down, and his perfectly shaved head tilts quizzically as he listens. To his left is Norma Rowe-Edwards, his deputy and the town nurse.

When Pitsiladis visited three years ago to gather DNA from Accompong residents, Rowe-Edwards voiced concern about his collection method because it necessitated rubbing cotton swabs inside mouths. Within days, the gossip around Accompong was that Pitsiladis’s cheek swabs were spreading AIDS.

To the colonel’s right is a local man whom Pitsiladis hired in 2008 to help with the swabbing. The man promised to collect DNA from two hundred Accompong natives. But when Pitsiladis returned to Glasgow to analyze the data, the sequence of Gs, Ts, As, and Cs was the same in all two hundred samples. The man claimed that area residents must just be very closely related. But the sequence was not
close
, it was
identical
. The man had swabbed himself two hundred times.

Despite these previous travails, embodied by the people now at the table, Pitsiladis is prevailing in today’s discussion. The DNA collection
kits no longer require a swab, just drool in a plastic disc, so the nurse’s concerns about invasive testing are alleviated. And the colonel would like to draw attention, and visitors, up the lone, spiraling mountain road that leads to this tiny farming community with its low-lying, pastel-colored concrete structures placed haphazardly beside canted tin shanties. So he’s glad to watch over the scientific work so that it can proceed without obstacle. By the end of the meeting, the colonel has reached across the table to grasp Pitsiladis’s hand. He has given his permission for more sampling.

This wedge of Jamaica is of paramount significance to Pitsiladis. The oral history of northwest Jamaica tells that the fiercest slaves were brought here, first by the Spanish and eventually the British, because it is surrounded by cliffs and ocean and difficult to escape. The part of the story that drew Pitsiladis here begins in 1655, when the British navy came to Jamaica to wrest control of the island from the Spanish. Intrepid slaves took advantage of the chaos to flee into the Cockpit Country, the mountainous highlands of northwest Jamaica. The escaped slaves founded their own communities and became known as Maroons, from the Spanish word
cimarrón
, which describes domesticated horses that flee into the wild.

The geography of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country is entirely unique on the island, and rare in the world. Known as karst topography, the remote and wet forest blankets limestone that has been cut away by millions of years of rain, leaving star-shaped valleys—called cockpits—walled in by sheer, vertiginous cliffs. Unlike most valleys formed by water, these have no rivers. The water works its way through the porous limestone and disappears into a lattice of underground caverns. For Maroons who mastered the terrain, and knew the layout of the limestone sinkholes, the Cockpit Country provided an impregnable defense against British troops.

After taking over from the Spanish, the British furiously ramped up slave importation, bringing Africans by the thousands from locations that correspond to modern-day Ghana and Nigeria. Many came from
ethnic groups expert in warfare—like the Coromantee of Ghana—sometimes sold into slavery by rival peoples who captured them. Contemporary letters from British officials show deep respect for the Coromantee, whom one British governor in Jamaica called “born Heroes . . . implacably revengeful when ill-treated,” and “dangerous inmates of a West Indian plantation.” Another Brit, writing in the eighteenth century, said that these “Gold Coast Negroes” were distinguished by “firmness both of body and mind; a ferociousness of disposition . . . an elevation of the soul which prompts them to enterprizes of difficulty and danger.”

In the 1670s, as slaves were increasingly brought to Jamaica, and increasingly fled to join the burgeoning communities in the mountains, the Maroons burned sugarcane fields, painting the night sky with the color of their intentions. “No flame is more alarming” than a cane fire, wrote William Beckford, an Englishman living in Jamaica. “The fury and velocity with which it burns and communicates cannot possibly be described.” From those bold Coromantee came the military genius known as Captain Cudjoe.

Cudjoe, along with Nanny, the female leader of Maroons on the east side of the island, created an elaborate spying system that employed Maroon soldiers and slaves on plantations to track the movements of British soldiers.
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When the British ventured into the Cockpit Country to retrieve runaway slaves, Cudjoe’s fighters ambushed them, not merely beating them back despite their superior numbers, but building an army with the weapons they seized. The battles were so lopsided that the soldiers of the vaunted British Empire, wrote one English planter, “dare not look [the Maroons] in the face . . . in equal numbers.” That British dread is still embedded in the local names of Cockpit Country districts:
Don’t Come Back
and
Land of Look Behind
.

The climactic battle occurred in 1738, just a short stroll from where
Pitsiladis met the colonel to discuss DNA collection. A band of Cudjoe’s soldiers hid in a limestone cave, now called Peace Cave, and placed a loose rock on the path outside. The British soldiers clattered the rock as they passed, while the Maroons waited, tallying their number. Then one of the Maroons emerged and signaled to others in the surrounding hills by blowing into an
abeng
, a bellowing instrument carved from a painted-green cow horn. Maroon fighters flooded the valley from every direction and massacred the British soldiers. Legend has it that only one British soldier was spared, sent home with his ear in his hand, to tell his superiors what had occurred. Shortly after the slaughter the British signed a treaty with the Maroons, granting them their remote territory—Cudjoe was made chief commander of nearby Trelawny Town—and their freedom, a full century before official emancipation.