Consider this: We want our athletes to be amazing. We want them to perform impossible feats. We want them to be superhuman. And we pay them for it, rewarding them with recognition and glory unparalleled in our society. Being a professional athlete is a very desirable career path.

Millions of people spend at least a part of their youth training to this end. For the majority, the impossibility of the goal becomes apparent through lack of focus, athleticism, or skill. For others, the dream looms large. These select few are placed in a system that constantly forces them to be better. Better than they were before. Better than athletes were 10 years ago. Better than what is possible. That is why we watch them.

Currently, in order to fulfill the standards of elite competition, athletes gear their whole lives to being better. Major college athletes practice for seven hours a day. Most carefully regulate their intake. They eat food designed to maximize body performance, and take prescribed vitamins to strengthen their muscles and bones. And some take steroids.

Anabolic steroids do not make someone stronger by themselves. In reality, they increase post-exercise muscle growth rate. This is still very useful. Athletes can train harder and more frequently, as recovery time between workouts is drastically decreased. For most people, thorough muscular workouts require two days of recovery time. For the steroid user, this time can be reduced to a few hours. Faster recovery equals more workouts and more strength, making more awesome athletes.

Just as elite athletes and those training to become them sacrifice much in order to obtain their goals, steroid users sacrifice their health. Steroids have a Pandora’s crate of side-effects. Psychologically, they cause “significant psychiatric symptoms including aggression and violence, mania, and less frequently psychosis and suicide” according to Central Nervous System Drugs, a scientific publication. Physically, steroid use leads to heart disease, balding, acne, and testicular shrinkage. And to think Alex Rodriguez went through all this, just to live up to the money we were paying him. I’m honored. Actually.

As knowledge of the human body is expanded and chemical synthesis is refined, performance enhancing drugs will become more effective and less harmful. Vitamins are harmless and beneficial. They are drugs nonetheless. When I go to the doctor, they make me fill out a form that asks me what drugs I am taking. The footnote says to include vitamins.

Eventually, other drugs will be afforded the same acceptance that vitamins are. Even now, gene therapy is progressing to the point where doctors can deactivate certain harmful genes. In time, they will be able to activate genes to make all athletes run like Bo Jackson or jump like Michael Jordan. Indeed, scientists will be able to make anyone into a Lebron James.

There is no denying that modern technology is beneficial in addressing diseases and conditions. Is it not also beneficial for my kids to be able to run 40 yards in four seconds and jump 50 inches high? Think of how awesome pick-up basketball games will be in a few generations. On the other hand, will professional sports diminish in importance as talent takes a backseat to treatment?

This leads to a moral quandary much broader than the world of sports. How will humanity move forward into an age in which evolution is not the product of eons of natural progression, but rather a function of treatment, and consequently wealth? Evolutionarily speaking, there must be a reason that that vast majority of humans are mediocre. Do we dare do God’s work, not knowing the consequences of our actions?

For hundreds of years, humans have been regulating what they take into their bodies in order to improve their health and abilities. Alex Rodriguez and the rest of the doping athletic world are doing the same, just in new and therefore threatening ways. Will we follow them?