Sink or swim?
“You can DNA test me, blood test me, urine test me, whatever you want to do,” Torres said in her first statements after arriving in Omaha. “Just test me because I want people to know that I am doing this right, that I’m 40, 41 years old and I’m doing this and I’m clean and I want a clean sport. I swam against swimmers who were dirty my entire life and it’s just something I wouldn’t do.”
People who know her say it is ludicrous to suspect Torres of doping. If she is guilty of anything, her friends say, it is of being a compulsive exerciser.
“I don’t think she has ever been out of shape a day in her life,” said Schubert, who coached Torres in the late 1980s. “I think that’s what makes this possible and conceivable.”
What I normally say is age is just a number,” Torres said here this week. “I have great people around me, and I’m able to recover. At my age, it’s all about recovery. It’s not just the stuff physically, it’s also what I put in my body. I take these awesome amino acids that help with recovery and build strength. I eat well. I think it’s a combination of a lot of things.”
As someone who turned 44 the other day, I want to believe I can improve my phenotype the “right” way. Given that I have neither extraordinary willpower nor God-given athletic talent, I’m hoping I might get by with a couple of coaches, two personal trainers, a physical therapist, a masseuse and a nanny. Or maybe just by going to the gym once in a while…

I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."
July 20th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
[…] The question at Genomeboy is to sink or to swim. […]