AFTER
no negative side efects were reported in the study,
questions remain as to whether ancillary tissue growth
could be a by-product of the injections.
Although the results of the IGF-1 study didn’t yield the
same kind of muscle-mass gains as the myostatin project,
the upside was that the therapy was performed on
mature animals, rather than embryonic ones. The impli-
cation was that injections directly into mature muscles
could result in significant growth on a site-by-site basis.
Still, neither approach had been tested on humans,
and it was unclear whether such genetic tampering
would even yield similar results. Although the lab mice
and rats showed no visible side efects, the question
remained as to whether unrestricted skeletal muscle
growth would prove safe in people.
Then, in 2004, news broke of a toddler in Germany
whose existence would advance muscle-building
science as much as all the hypermuscular mice, rats,
and cattle combined.
THAT’S MYO BOY
When pediatric neurologist Markus Schuelke of
Charité University Medical Center in Berlin, Germany,
took his first glance at a particularly jittery newborn in
1999, the doctor immediately noticed a startling physi-
cal anomaly. Like those of Lee’s mice, the boy’s limbs
were bulging with well-developed muscles. He looked
as if he had been pumping iron for years, despite being
fresh from the womb. Only weeks earlier, an associ-
ate of Schuelke’s had read the report by Lee and his
colleagues and suggested that the boy might have a
naturally occurring mutation to his myostatin gene, as
in the Belgian Blue and Piedmontese cattle.
Using a special device, Schuelke discovered that both
copies of the boy’s myostatin gene were inactive, mean-
ing he produced no myostatin at all. He was essentially
a muscle-making machine without an “of” switch.
Other than muscle size and strength about twice that
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