Summary Of The Sports Gene By David Epstein

Do genetics really matter when discussing a person’s ability to perform in their respective sport? Or is it the amount of hours that a person has put into the craft? In “The Sports Gene” by David Epstein, the author attempts to answer this gene vs. practice question. Epstein does this by including examples of high jumpers, differences between average and world champion chess players, as well as what scientists call the ‘big bang’ of body types, to name a few. The author brings up many science topics, such as vision of moving objects, athletic differences between genders, responsiveness to training, specializations in certain sports at young ages, and mutations in DNA and how they affect some very rare athletes. The topics that most intrigued me were responsiveness in training because I love to practice different sports, and DNA mutations, as we are currently studying DNA in our own Biology class. Epstein states that there can be high and low responders to

Epstein brings this point up late in the book with the example of Eero Mantyranta, a three time gold medalist skier. The author explains that a scientist studied Mantyranta and realized that Eero had a very high amount of hemoglobin. This is due to the fact that in one of the pairs of bases in the EPO receptor gene, there was an adenine where a guanine should have been. This created a stop codon, leaving the EPOR without ‘brake’ to stop hemoglobin production and Mantyranta’s production of red blood cells increased dramatically. Epstein also brings up the point that Eero had practiced skiing for tens of thousands of hours, and argues that this is the reason, along with the mutation in his DNA, that Mantyranta was a gold medalist. The author interviews Mantyranta himself, and also uses information from a study done on Mantyranta and his family’s DNA to justify