Sport and Human Genetics: the 1984 Olympic Scientific Congress Proceedings, Volume 4

"_Sport and Human Genetics_ contains selected proceedings from this inter-disciplinary program of the 1984 Olympic Scientific Congress, which was held at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, preceding the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The Congress was organized by the College of Human Development and Performance of the University of Oregon in collaboration with the cities of Eugene and Springfield. This was the first time in the history of the Congress that the event was organized by a group of private individuals, unaided by a federal government. The fact that the Congress was attended by more than 2,200 participants from more than 100 different nations is but one indication of its success." "It is often said that ‘‘athletes are born and then they are made!’’ This rather simple statement implies, first, a natural endowment or genotypic potential for successful performance and second, the opportunity and environmental conditions to realize this potential. Thus, the interaction of the individual’s genotype and his or her environment is emphasized. Athletes obviously are products of their genes and their environments, in addition to possessing some characteristics that covary with performance. The determinants of sports performance are many, and sport scientists have expended considerable effort toward understanding phenotypic variation in size, physique, and body composition; metabolic powers and capacities; strength, speed, and skill; and cardiovascular adaptations relative to outstanding athletic performance. These efforts include not only the effects of training and practice, but also age- and sex-associated variation. Training and practice are important environmental components of the genotype-environment interaction; of course, response to these environmental factors varies with age and from individual to individual. However, relatively little research has been done on the contribution of genes to such human phenotypic characteristics. The same can be said for behavioral concomitants of athletic performance, for example, temperament. Although often attributed to social and cultural circumstances, there is evidence that a substantial portion of the variation in temperament has a genetic component (Buss & Plomin, 1975, 1984)." This symposium and the papers that contribute to it represent a concerted effort by several human biologists, human geneticists, and sport scientists to summarize aspects of the available literature and to present new observations on the genetic component of sport performance. Performance in the sport setting is indeed complex and not easy to study directly. To this end, the authors in this volume consider the genetic sources of variation in several contributory components of successful athletic performance. Wilson summarizes the results of the Louisville Twin Study, focusing specifically on the physical growth (height and weight) of monozygotic and dizygotic twins from birth to 9 years of age. Malina presents an overview of motor development and motor performance, emphasizing that our efforts at understanding movement are largely oriented toward the product rather than the underlying processes and influencing factors. Data are reviewed for motor development during early childhood and then for performance in strength and motor tasks at older ages using observations on twins, siblings, and parents and their offspring. Bouchard summarizes the data from his laboratory and those of others concerning the heritability of maximal aerobic powers and aerobic capacities, as well as the genotype dependence of adaptive responses to training and other environmental variables. Schull presents a unique view of health-related fitness in terms of the genetic modulation of obesity, blood pressure, and plasma lipids. Although this perspective considers only a part of the spectrum of physical well-being, it is important to recognize the possible relationship of these conditions to the more commonly used indices of health-related fitness such as fatness, endurance, strength, and flexibility. Roberts attempts to synthesize the observations of the preceding four presentations, which dissect out certain contributory components of athletic excellence, and to place these observations in the context of the evidence for general control in such multifactorial traits. These five papers are essentially synthetic, attempting to bring together a rather diverse range of information on several contributory components of athletic performance. The genetic influence on factors that may covary with performance are generally not considered in detail. These include, for example, somatic and sexual maturation during adolescence, physique and other morphological characteristics, perceptual characteristics, and behavioral traits. The six contributed papers included in this volume are equally as diverse. Wolanski offers a brief summary of family studies (parent-offspring similarities) done in Poland over the past 20 years. The other contributed papers focus on the genotypic source of variance in several specific factors related to performance, such as cardiac size, muscle fiber composition, force-velocity relationships, anaerobic alactacid work capacity, and sensitivity to training."