Deoxyribonucleic acid—or, DNA as it is more commonly known—used to be the stuff of biology classrooms and X-Men comic books. These days it is the centerpiece for TV cop shows and various other forms of science fiction come to life.
The reality is that there’s a company based in Boulder, Colorado—an offshoot of a firm specializing in athletic improvement and talent measurement—that now offers a DNA test that screens broad, general types of sports abilities in humans. Basically, for $150, you can have your child tested to see if he or she has a propensity to become a sprinter or long distance runner or swimmer, etc. It is all based on the alphabet soup of genetics, specifically the presence of the ACTN3 gene.
The company is called Atlas Sports Genetics and its Atlas First test kit involves using a cheek swab/saliva sample that is then sent to a company in Australia to help determine possible athletic destinies of the test subjects. Basically, the results indicate a propensity for speed and power sports like football or track, or possibly a combination of both. Results can also steer the test subjects toward endurance sports.
Essentially, Atlas (which stands for Athletic Talent Laboratory Analysis System) provides informed speculation, but in this age of trying to get an early edge, the Atlas First test could end up being a valuable tool for overzealous parents who crave otherwise unobtainable specifics about their toddlers in a sports culture where very little is left to chance. By the way, New York (and California) state laws prohibit the mailing of saliva samples to outside states, so for any interested parents in Gotham, it looks like a trip to New Jersey is in the cards if you want to legally deal with Atlas Sports Genetics.
New York Family Sports called ATLAS (Athletic Talent Laboratory Analysis System) Sports Genetics president Kevin Reilly in Boulder for an old-fashioned phone conversation about his new fangled business.
As a start, could you tell us about how Atlas Sports Genetics originated?
Actually the company that we have (EPIC Athletic Performance Inc.) primarily manufactures new products for athletic talent identification. Epic’s one main consultant we have is a guy named Boyd Epley, and he was the founder of the strength and conditioning program at the University of Nebraska, and for 30 years there Nebraska became legendary in terms of both their strength and conditioning and their talent identification in terms of how to identify athletes who could compete for Division I scholarships. We started to implement that system they had in Nebraska on a private basis as far as equipment and software. But the problem we had with a lot of these performance tests is that if you try to do these tests with kids younger than 8 to 10 or in that range is real difficult because kids just don’t have the motor skills to do well on a lot of these physical tests. So we were interested in adding a line of products on that would help us with that set of athletes who were a little bit younger, and we found out about a company out of Australia called Genetic Technologies. It was about a year ago that they were the first one’s to patent a procedure that analyzes one specific gene called ACTN3, which has with research been related to sports performance, especially for speed/power sports. And after our investigation we thought that would be a good fit as far as a product to complement our other product line. We brought the genetics component in December of this last year.
Did being in Boulder, which is kind sports-obssessed, harbor this type of development for you company?
Before we added the genetics, our other testing systems are pretty isolated to the college market and junior and senior groups of high school athletes. The genetics has certainly opened it up with younger athletes, but mainly the calls and orders we’ve been getting have actually been from older athletes wanting to use this more than younger kids and their parents. It has really kind of challenged us to look in terms of expanding our realm to different groups.
Are the older athletes using the test to figure out where they went wrong when they were younger?
That’s not that far off. An example of a call was one we got back in January. It was a guy down in Florida, 72 years old and had been an athlete most of his life but was thinking about taking up triathlons. He just wanted to find out if there was a test available that could help find out if he was predisposed to those characteristics that would allow him to do well. Actually, our biggest interest group that we’ve had has been more with personal trainers that have said this is a good product to use with their clients to find out the type of energy systems that their clients are best acclimated for. Even though the immediate focus was our interest in young kids, there’s been very few orders with the really young kids because there is nothing you can do as far as training-wise that is going to effect them for several years until they start to get older.
We’re always looking out for things overbearing parents can use to drive their kids toward a certain goal or sport. Do you think your product is part of that culture that doesn’t believe in leaving anything to chance?
I think that is a legitimate concern, but fortunately we’ve seen very little of that either on the orders or the inquiries from parents. The parents that have called with some younger kids I think are asking appropriate questions which is more like “Would this expand my awareness of other sports that I haven’t exposed my kids to?” versus those parents who are trying to eliminate sports and get them more sports-specific and lock into a certain sport. We’ve actually found that the parents are pretty smart and they have figured out in terms of where the best use of this test is.
To a lay person, sometimes it gets a little scary when you talk about genetics, and it seems like sci-fi. How do you try to counter that fear?
I think the best example of this that I’ve told people is that around 15 years ago when the whole field of sports nutrition came into play, there were a lot of people saying “the human body is the human body and you don’t have to feed athletes any different than you do regular people.” Well, we now know that is ridiculous and that athletes are different animals in terms of how we feed them.
What is your response to articles where people have said your test is “another way of selling snake oil”?
It gets back to my earlier point that because it is so new, and when new things come along there’s a variety of reactions. On one extreme they might say ‘this is the latest and greatest thing and this will be the best thing that ever came along’ and the other extreme is ‘well, this is just snake oil and there’s nothing to it.’ Well, to the snake oil side of this, there’s been about a half a dozen peer-reviewed articles that have been published in scientific journals that are dispelling the snake oil component. There is legitimate science to this. The bigger question is how it is going to be best applied to those athletes for the purpose of what we are trying to do.
With your weightlifting background, did you ever picture yourself getting into something so scientific?
No, not at all. I’m the furthest one from being an actual geneticist, and a lot of this has been quite a learning experience for me as well. Like with the sports nutrition, in sports performance you have to stay up on the current trends. There’s some that come and go, and then there’s others that tend to stay around. I think genetic sports performance that is here. I’m excited more for the future of where it is going than where things stand at the current time.
We do live in a high-tech climate. Even the Gatorade commercials have all these guys hooked up to machines, but that is probably all fake. Do you really see the genetics interest sticking around?
There are two tracks of athletes. One is kids who just go out and play soccer on the weekends and so forth and may have an opportunity to compete at a varsity level at high school, and that’s pretty much going to be their career. The second track of athletes are those who are very gifted and who are going to go along for a scholarship in college or into professional or Olympic aspirations. Right now we are really focused more on that elite level group in terms of anything we can do to offer the parents, coaches and athletes some additional information that might be helpful in their training. I think that is beneficial.
How hard is it to explain what your company does or is doing to a 4-year-old?
The calls that we’ve had…there’s been a dozen or so with the really young one-year-old to five-year-old kids. What we are telling them is yes, in theory you can do your genetics test and you’ll get the information back, but your genetics are something you are born with and you die with. The scientific information will be relevant. The bigger question is why would a parent want to do this test on a 4-year-old? It is going to be very limited in terms of the information that can alter the type of training that a 4-year-old is going to do. You really want the kids at that age just to have fun and go out and develop the different skills and interests in sports. Other than maybe some coffee table type of conversation, there really is no benefit from a sports performance side of doing the testing at that age, whether it be the genetics or any of the other tests we do with athletes.
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For more information: go to atlasgene.com
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