Examination of Witnesses (Questions 106-119)
PROFESSOR IAN
MCGRATH,
MR JOHN
BREWER, DR
BRUCE HAMILTON
AND DR
ANNA CASEY
25 OCTOBER 2006
Q106 Chairman: Good morning everyone.
Could I particularly welcome our distinguished witnesses before
us this morning, John Brewer, Director of Sports Science and the
Lucozade Sport Science Academy, GlaxoSmithKline; Dr Bruce Hamilton,
the Chief Medical Officer for UK Athletics; Professor Ian McGrath,
University of Glasgow and Chairman of the Physiological Society;
and last, but by no means least, Dr Anna Casey, Research Fellow
at QinetiQ. Welcome to you all. I wonder if I could start this
session by asking you to say what your role is in this particular
area that the Committee is looking into, which is about human
enhancement technologies in sport.
Mr Brewer: I am the Director of
Sports Science at GlaxoSmithKline with particular responsibility
for running the Lucozade Sports Science Academy. I have a responsibility
for overseeing our research and development programme for sports
science and also for developing our new product pipeline for new
sports nutrition products that we use to enhance sports performance.
I have a background of working in applied sports science for the
last 20 years.
Q107 Chairman: Do you see athletics
as a vehicle for selling your products or is it the other way
round?
Mr Brewer: We are very much focussed
on developing products that meet the needs of elite sports people
across a range of sports, not just athletics but team sports (rugby,
soccer and so on) and in doing that we have to produce products
that are of the highest quality and which work. If we can do that
then we are obviously very well aware that those products will
then have a knock-on effect into the mass market. It is really
looking to get elite endorsement for high quality products that
would then be preferred by the consumer at the mass market level.
Q108 Chairman: So it is a two way
process.
Mr Brewer: Very much so, yes.
Q109 Chairman: Dr Hamilton?
Dr Hamilton: My responsibility
is Chief Medical Officer at UK Athletics. It gives me the responsibility
for looking after the health and wellbeing of our athletes as
well as the performance component of our athletes. From my perspective
the relevant issues here are the enhancement of performance through
preventing injury and the enhancement of performance through the
use of legitimate processes. The conflict that I always have is
that we are always being asked to push the envelope where that
grey area is within what is legal and what is not legal.
Q110 Chairman: I think we will return
to that because that is a key area as to whether there is a conflict
of interest between those two particular roles. Professor McGrath?
Professor McGrath: As you mentioned
I have two roles here, one is that I am Chairman of the Physiological
Society which is a learned society for the area of human physiology
which is what sport is utilising. We have an interest in employing
modern science in the area of human physiology and sport. I am
not convinced that it is always the best science that applies
in this area and we can come back to that. My day job as Professor
of Physiology in Glasgow is to lead the Exercise Science group
and there what we have been trying to do is to have Exercise Science
embedded in a biomedical science group rather than a technologically
oriented group. We have a new initiative called IDEAL (Institute
of Diet, Exercise and Lifestyle) which means we look at the interaction
of physiology and nutrition with exercise. We also have at the
extreme of sport, studies on East African runners to see what
makes them run better than everybody else. We are trying to work
in an area between medicine and sport to look at physiological
limits in both directions.
Q111 Chairman: Are East African runners
different to our runners?
Professor McGrath: There is an
international study into that at the moment. It is very interesting
because the thing at the moment that ties up best is running to
school. We are looking at the genetics are, we are looking at
the physiology but the thing that correlates best at the moment
is that those who run furthest to school do best as runners.
Q112 Chairman: There are 650 people
in this building who would profit from being on your study; perhaps
we could talk to you afterwards about that. Last, but by no means
least, Dr Casey?
Dr Casey: I am Anna Casey; I am
Research Leader in Human Metabolic Physiology and Nutrition at
QinetiQ, formerly the Defence Evaluation Research Agency (we split
from MoD back in 2002). My primary role is metabolic physiology
and nutrition research. I do not have a teaching role. Our primary
purpose is to support the MoD in terms of supplying research,
supplying consultancy and in my case in helping the MoD to set
the requirement for military feeding. Those are probably the major
elements relevant to this inquiry.
Q113 Chairman: Could I ask you specifically,
Dr Casey, whether in fact you would put into nutritional feed
for soldiers or military personnel products which would be on
the banned list of WADA for athletes?
Dr Casey: We certainly would not
exclude that possibility. There is a very important distinction
to make between performance enhancement and cheating in terms
of breaking the rules of a given sport. Obviously in the military
we do not have the same constraints as, for example, the IOC would
have. One is always looking for something that would give military
personnel an extra edge. In most cases, that is simply weaning
them off hamburgers onto an appropriate diet and optimising their
training. Those are obviously the two most important things. However,
for a group of military personnel whose training is optimised
and whose diet is optimised, who are highly trained and have great
demands placed on them then we would consider appropriate ergogenic
and cognitive aids. Of course, one is not always looking for a
level playing field in a military context. In that context the
overriding consideration would be one of health and safety: is
that substance safe to use in the quantities that peer reviewed
research has indicated is required for an ergogenic effect? I
think there is an important distinction there.
Q114 Chairman: If you looked at something
like EPO would you feed that as a normal course for soldiers who
are going to have long periods in the battle field to raise their
red blood cells?
Dr Casey: It is not being used
by the military and there are no plans to use it. There are some
safety concerns over it and that will always be the overriding
factor. There are very few situations in which such a risk benefit
analysis would take place. Although we would not exclude that
possibility I think that it is further down the line. Certainly
none of these things have been excluded.
Q115 Chairman: You have a wonderful
opportunity—or the military have a wonderful opportunity—to
be able to do research into performance enhancing drugs or technologies
and for that research then to be actually transferred into sport
or into other areas of medicine. Are you conscious of doing that
or is the MoD conscious of doing that?
Dr Casey: Yes, absolutely.
Q116 Chairman: Could you give us
an example where something has emerged within the military which
has been transferred into sport?
Dr Casey: There are no obvious
examples of that.[1]
In fact what happens in most cases is that the military feeding
initiatives are based on developments in sports science; that
is the way round it often occurs. However, there is a lot of research
funded by the Ministry of Defence which is into substances like
modafinil, ephedrine, those types of things which are on the banned
list which UK Sport, for instance, would not want to sponsor research
in. There is still research going on sponsored by the Ministry
of Defence into things like this. It does not mean they are being
used but it does mean that they are keeping an open mind and they
are sponsoring research in these areas. To my knowledge there
are no illegal substances being researched by the MoD which have
been transferred to athletes.
Q117 Chairman: Professor McGrath, just
following on this theme, are you conscious of what is coming out
of other areas of medical or military science which could be used
in sport?
Professor McGrath: I think from
the technological side there is a great deal in terms of monitoring
devices. If you know the state of your soldiers when they are
out there in situations of danger, that is something the military,
I hope, is concentrating on very much and developing. These could
very much come back into the sports sphere because the military
have the resources and the money to develop these things. If you
can know the temperature, if you know where they are using global
positioning stuff, you know about their metabolic state, you know
how much they are moving, all that can now be done in a sort of
sci-fi way and fed back wirelessly. I think there is a great capacity
for that. The other point I would make is that there has not actually
been much good research into the difference, for example, between
raising your blood through good altitude and giving EPO. That
is an area I think the military could work on because it is very
much in their interest to get maximised metabolic performance.
The military could fund that kind of research which is ethically
against sports to fund. I think you could get good physiological
research funded by the military. I know Britain is not funding
space technology, but space technology is enormously important
here because of the metabolic demands of people who are in an
isolated situation and feeding back information there. There is
a great deal technologically but also physiologically, there is
a job there; I do not know if the military is doing it, but they
should be.
Q118 Chairman: What I am trying to
get in this early session is a feel from you as to where the drivers
for research are coming from. Obviously the military is one, but
is it coming out of our medical research establishments? In your
evidence you mentioned that we were pretty poor in terms of research.
Professor McGrath: The problem
is that there are not the drivers to do the research; the remits
of the research councils do not include sport. I know that EPSRC
is getting on to this at the moment; they are having a meeting
this weekend called "going for gold". In general it
is not the Medical Research Council's job to do the physiology
in relation to sport. It is not the BBSRC's remit so there is
not really a strong push on the resources going into this area.
The scientific possibilities are there, but people who do this
kind of work tend to drift off in their career into cardiovascular
research or diabetes because they can apply the biological expertise
there and get funding from either charities or research councils,
whereas sports science tends to be a Cinderella subject which
does not have the drivers. A lot of the money does come from the
drinks industry and so on but it cannot be entirely independent.
Q119 Chairman: John, obviously you
are a commercial company at the end of the day and we fully accept
that, but do you actually spend a lot of money on research which
has a direct impact on the athletes whom you are hoping will take
your nutritional products?
Mr Brewer: We currently have a
research budget for sports science which is approximately half
a million pounds a year and we fund that in five academic universities,
four in this country and one in Australia. I think there are two
main drivers behind that research, one is for us to look at new
claims and to develop new products, particularly the new product
area where we are looking to fund research that will enable us
to produce products which are different from the range that we
currently have and which will give us cutting edge products and
cutting edge claims that we can make around those products. We
are also conscious of our need to fund what we would term blue
sky research which is a research which may not have an immediate
effect for us but which may enable us to enhance sports science
knowledge and perhaps produce benefits in the longer term over
the next five or 10 years.
1 Note by the witness: In the UK. There are
several examples from the US military, including caffeine gum. Back
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