Enhancement: From Steroids to Skin Tone

During the late 1990s, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were joined at the hip. Their home run derby seasons helped bring baseball back from the brink after its jarring strike during the 1994-1995 season. This work stoppage led to a tremendous amount of fan anger, and the McGwire/Sosa race to break one of the most cherished records in professional sports – the single season home run record – brought fans (and revenue) back to major league baseball.

Well, we know how that story played out: Sosa’s and McGwire’s respective 66 and 70 home runs during the 1998 season was quickly tarnished by allegations that they both used performance enhancing drugs (PED). The dream season of 1998 – not to mention Barry Bonds’ 73 home runs in 2001 – was seen by many fans as one big lie, leading to more disillusionment and questions about the game’s integrity.

Now, McGwire, Sosa, and the question of enhancement are back in the news but for strangely different reasons. After years of seclusion following his elusive Congressional testimony concerning steroid use in baseball, McGwire’s former team – the St. Louis Cardinals – has hired him as a hitting coach. McGwire’s return to baseball caused a splash in the sports media with questions swirling about whether he will confirm or deny accusations that he used PEDs during his career – allegations that have thus far kept him from any meaningful consideration for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But, as in 1998, when McGwire is in the news Sosa isn’t that far behind. And neither are the enhancement issues. But this time, Sosa is making waves for different reasons: he shocked many a few weeks ago by appearing at the Latin Grammy’s with dramatically lighter skin.

Sosa claimed that this new fair skin complexion is the simple byproduct of a skin rejuvenation process, and that the lighting from the photo op made him look much fairer than he actually is. However, a spokesman for Sosa said that he may decide to endorse the skin product that gave him this new look “if he feels it is of good quality.”

That might be a profitable move. Skin lightening is big business across the globe – an estimated $18 billion dollar a year industry in Asia alone. And, as I described in a 2007 Commentary in the New Scientist, genetic technologies might enter the fray with new products that work at the molecular level to lighten skin color.

The growing publicity surrounding skin lightening products is another troubling example of how technologies – whether they be new skin rejuvenation products or RNA based lotions that affect melanin production – are being used to “fix” social problems such as the irrational stigma attached to dark skin. Having a superstar like Sammy Sosa as, quite literally, the new “face” of this movement might harm broader efforts towards racial equality by focusing attention on the “fix” as opposed to the deep seeded bias that makes the “fix” attractive in the first place.