That was fiction some few years ago. Have your say Mail the editor Though already being exploited in a limited way on cancer patients, the cutting edge of gene technology has so far only been applied to mice and monkeys. The results have been astonishing. There were similar extraordinary results with growth hormone genes. Within one month of implantation, dwarf mice had doubled in size.
Direct injection is the least satisfactory of the three and can only be used on muscle fibres.
Using a virus to introduce an alien gene is the most effective but difficult to control. The introduced gene riding piggyback on a virus could affect neighbouring cells it was not intended for. The third method is the most fail-safe but also the most complicated. Initially, gene-doping will only be used on a fraction of cells. In other words, make athletes run faster or longer.