Abstract
Behind every champion athlete are scores of physiologists studying his or her performance. This is no new phenomenon. Since the late 19th century, physiologists have been bringing ‘well-trained’ athletes into their labs to produce knowledge about how human bodies work, to determine the causes of human fatigue, and to probe human limits. In this article, I argue that the athlete, like the fruit fly or the mouse cress plant, can be considered a model organism. Ethnographic data are presented from 7 months of participant-observation and semistructured interviews in three human performance laboratories located in South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ethnographic data suggest that the athlete functions as a model organism in physiology for two reasons. First, athletes ‘accommodate’ the particular experimental instruments and practical demands of fatigue research. Second, a distinct ‘biosociality’ drives the choice of athlete as model organism.
A composite image on a British biology department’s website represents the different kinds of research it conducts. The top left corner of the image shows what looks like a cropped electrocardiograph trace. A close-up of a Drosophila fly occupies the top right corner. Other scenes representing the department include a dated photograph of scientists clad in white lab coats, a more recent photograph of researchers monitoring a subject pedaling on a stationary bicycle, a diagram of a simple molecule, a brightly colored micrograph of an unidentified tissue, and, in the bottom right corner of the image, an action shot of a lean runner, his long legs midstride, eyes focused on a point far in the distance. Lab coats, body tissues, Drosophila, these things are familiar in biology departments. But the appearance of the athlete seems a bit bizarre.
While physicians have been interested in understanding the effects of exercise on the human body for centuries (Berryman, 2003), the routine use of athletes as laboratory research subjects is relatively new. Physiologists began systematically experimenting upon athletes around the turn of the 20th century (Hale, 2008: 368; Hoberman, 1992a, 1992b; Mitchell and Saltin, 2003; Scheffler, 2011). Physiologists working today conduct laboratory studies of ‘elite’ athletes, who are at least nationally ranked, as well as ‘sub-elite’ and ‘well-trained’ athletes who are collegiate, club-level, and recreational athletes. The question is, why? To understand laboratory experimentation on athletes, it is useful to consider the athlete, like the Drosophila fly depicted above the runner in the website montage, as a ‘model organism’.
There is a rich literature in the history and philosophy of biology and biomedicine on model organisms (Ankeny and Leonelli, 2011; Comfort, 2009; Creager, 2002; De Chadarevian, 1998; Friese and Clarke, 2012; Holmes, 1993; Keller, 2000; Kohler, 1993, 1994; Leonelli, 2007). Most scholars agree that a model organism is a plant or animal organism, often a species, considered uniquely suited to the study of a particular scientific problem, with the findings of such studies generalizable to other organisms or species. To be a model, the organism becomes standardized and circulated such that a community and ‘moral economy’ develop around the organism (Ankeny and Leonelli, 2011; Kohler, 1993, 1994; Leonelli, 2007). Standardization continues once an organism enters the lab, as scientists explicitly and implicitly control for different kinds of variation.
Historians and philosophers of biology agree that there is no standard path to becoming a model organism. Some organisms appear to be good models long after they have been brought into the laboratory; others are purposefully manufactured and marketed as model organisms from the start (Ankeny and Leonelli, 2011; Creager, 2002). Similarly, there is no ‘perfect’ model, with model organisms studied in spite of a certain amount of epistemological fragility (Bolker, 2009: 493–494). 1 That is, accounts of the history of particular model organisms often mention resistance from other scientists at various points in time to either the theoretical or practical utility of the organism (Friese and Clarke, 2012: 35, 44; Leonelli, 2007: 35; Nelson, 2013).
Finally, most scholars emphasize the practical fit of an organism with particular laboratory or experimental demands. For example, an organism might be easy to maintain in the laboratory, cheap to breed or grow and feed, have a limited number of chromosomes or short life cycle, or already be ‘familiar from another context’ (Bolker, 2009: 487). For example, historian Robert Kohler (1993, 1994) describes how Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, became a model for the study of experimental evolution and later evolutionary genetics because of its short life cycle, versatile breeding conditions, and amenability to student projects. Sabina Leonelli (2007) emphasizes that the mouse cress plant, or Arabidopsis, was easy to maintain, required little space, contained a very manageable five chromosomes, had a high mutation rate, and required little time to generate many progeny. Historian Soraya De Chadarevian (1998) notes that similar features of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans made it a model organism for developmental biology, while also drawing attention to its good fit with a particular instrument, namely, the electron microscope. Angela Creager (2002), likewise, describes how, from the 1930s through the 1950s, biochemist Wendell Stanley’s choice of the tobacco mosaic virus as model organism succeeded in part because of its synergy with the particular instrument of the air-driven ultracentrifuge (pp. 98–140). In short, research on model organisms has shown that it is not enough for an organism to make sense in theory; it also must do so in practice, what science studies scholar Andrew Pickering (1993) calls the ‘accommodation’ of experiment.
During the first half of the 20th century, particular kinds of humans, too, became common, if not explicitly model, organisms in scientific experiments: hospital patients, prisoners, orphans, prostitutes, soldiers, Jews, African-Americans, and college students (Comfort, 2009; Goodman et al., 2003; Lederer, 1995; Prescott, 2002). According to historians of science and medicine, most of these populations were particularly useful – or made to be useful, as Goodman et al. (2003) put it – because they were captive and therefore many variables of life could be controlled and measured; they were subjects who could not refuse to be studied. For example, historian Nathaniel Comfort (2009) shows how prisoners in the early to mid 20th century became model organisms in malaria research because they were assumed to be biologically similar to normal citizens, ‘came conveniently in two color-coded strains’ (black and white), were not subject to most ethical restrictions of the time, and could be experimented upon over long periods of time with a high degree of control over factors such as ‘diet and daily routine’ (pp. 196–197). Revealing a particular case of ‘self-discipline’ as theorized by Foucault, Comfort (2009) describes how prisoners even became the researchers themselves, fully participating in and even managing experiments. In other words, Comfort (2009) recounts a rather extreme case of a model organism demonstrating a practical fit with the demands of experiment.
While some of these human groups, such as orphans and prisoners, are no longer targeted subject populations, others, such as patients and the poor, continue to enroll in greater and greater numbers of scientific and medical studies (Goodman et al., 2003: 15). Medical anthropologists, though they do not use the language of the ‘model organism’, document how patients and the poor align with the demands of particular biomedical experiments by being, for example, ‘treatment naïve’, prone to a particular disease, and in need of money and/or medical treatment – the ‘therapeutic benefit’ of participation (Abadie, 2010; Fisher, 2009; Petryna, 2009).
During the 20th century, physiologists began to study athletes more systematically as well. Where, or how, does ‘the athlete’ fit among Drosophila, Arabidopsis, and C. elegans, or among prisoners, patients, and the poor? If constructed as a model organism, what is the athlete a model of? And, equally important, how does the athlete function as a model in practice?
In 2006 and 2007, I spent a total of 7 months in three ‘human performance’ laboratories in South Africa, Great Britain, and the United States. At the labs, I observed the daily routine of scientists and engaged them in many informal conversations about their work; I participated in some of the routine tasks during a trial, such as recording measurements; I made a set of chronological daily notes and photographs; and I conducted 63 open-ended semistructured interviews with scientists and technicians. I found that the athletes enable physiologists to attempt to answer one basic question about human physiology that has hounded physiologists for over a century: ‘What are the mechanisms of fatigue?’ (Rabinbach, 1990; see also Fye, 1987; Geison, 1987; Gillespie, 1987; Tipton, 2003). Describing precisely how the athlete enables this – and therefore how the athlete functions as a model organism in practice – is the subject of this article. Adopting the language of Pickering (1993), who has referred to the everyday practice of science as ‘a dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ (p. 567), I describe how athletes as model organisms accommodate experiment in many ways. But athletes are not ‘perfect’ model organisms, and I briefly note where they resist experiment as well. I conclude that the practical fit with particular experimental demands trumps the theoretical limitations of generalizing from athletes to others. In addition, I suggest that, though this has not been noted in other cases of model organisms, a distinct ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow, 1996), or shared identity born out of one’s bodily experiences, drives the affinity of these scientists toward their organisms.
Notably, in spite of the institutional and national diversity of my three field sites, the daily practice of exercise physiology inside the three labs was remarkably consistent, from similar experimental spaces, instruments, techniques, and protocol designs to the use of athletes as subjects, male gendering of the field, and scientists’ status anxiety vis-à-vis other sciences. In addition, funding for all three labs came from government health research organizations and private industry. (Only the lab in the United States also had large research grants from the military.) This is not to say that there are no national differences in the practice of exercise physiology – only that my data do not reveal what those differences are. Historian Vanessa Heggie (2011) has begun comparative work on 20th-century sports medicine; similar comparative research on the 20th-century histories of exercise physiology in different national contexts is much needed. That being said, the local context of the laboratories did matter in my research, determining, as I will show, which kinds of athlete–organisms are available for study.
Inside the human performance laboratory
I begin with an account of one human performance trial. It is 8:25 a.m. at a Human Performance Laboratory. The subject, whom I will call Kevin, arrives to the environmental chamber for his ‘heat familiarization trial’. 2 During this trial, Kevin will be made familiar with the task of cycling for 50 minutes at 104°F and 40 percent humidity. Kevin strips down, having his own bike outfit on already. The principal investigator (PI) of this study into the effects of heat on muscle activity and fatigue, Robert, leads Kevin to the BioDex room down the hall. Before being tested on the BioDex machine, however, Robert wants to determine the temperature of Kevin’s leg muscle and so inserts a temperature probe 2 cm into Kevin’s leg (Figure 1). Another exercise scientist, Rolly, puts a cannula into a vein in Kevin’s forearm and attaches a stopcock. This way Robert can take blood samples from Kevin throughout the cycling protocol (Figure 2).
Inserting the muscle temperature probe.
Drawing blood through a cannula during a cycling protocol.
About 15 minutes later, Kevin moves to the BioDex chair, where he will perform ‘maximal voluntary contractions’, or MVCs. In future trials, he will do MVCs and the muscle temperature probe both before and after cycling in the heat in the environmental chamber. The BioDex, which looks like an elaborate chair connected to a computer, is a machine that measures the amount of power a person (or a person’s leg, arm, etc.) can produce. They strap Kevin in so that the rest of his body cannot move when he extends his right leg. Robert attaches an electrode panel to Kevin to measure muscle activity during the MVC.
After 20 minutes of Robert testing the signal of the electrode panel, a third scientist, Nadia, leads Kevin for a warmup. She has him push against the BioDex machine (which is set at a fixed resistance) at an effort of 50 percent, then 50 percent again, and then 70 percent. After this, they prepare him for exerting 100 percent. He is asked to do three sets of 100 percent. Most of the cyclists dread this ‘max’ test more than the cycling part of the protocol. They report that the pain in the quadriceps muscle is excruciating. The scientists start to scream at Kevin, ‘Push! Push! Push!’ (Figure 3).
The MVC.
Fast forward through all of the setup in the environmental chamber, Kevin is now in the middle of the cycling protocol in the chamber. Just 10 minutes into the protocol, he is not happy. He does not think that he can do this. Robert asks him whether he wants the fan on. He does, so Robert goes outside and turns the dial of the big turbine fan to ‘level 2’. Robert’s main experimental goal is to get Kevin to 50 minutes and to reach a ‘max’, or almost max, effort in doing so. The environmental conditions are for the most part preset, but Robert can tinker with some conditions, like wind speed and workload, to fit Kevin’s needs. He then keeps those conditions constant for the rest of the study.
‘I don’t think I can go much longer’.
‘Should I drop it down to two hundred watts?’
‘Yes’.
‘How does that feel?’
‘I’ll let you know. [pause]It’s still too high’.
‘Where should I drop it to? One eighty? [pause] What do you think of that?’ (referring to the wind).
‘It feels a lot better’.
Robert goes out to get a tube to take the first lactate (blood sample). He comes back in and takes a blood sample. Kevin’s face is red and white and blotchy. He has blood on his arm, dripping down to his hand and forming a tiny puddle on the floor, and wires going everywhere. Robert uses a rag to add cold water to Kevin’s face and head. It is a very caring thing to watch him do. Moments later, Kevin proclaims, ‘I can’t manage that’ (referring to the workload). Robert drops it to 160. Robert gets swabs to wipe the blood. He says things like, ‘How do you feel now?’ ‘Just do the best you can’. ‘You look all right’. Kevin asks how long it has been. He then announces, ‘I’m gonna try for forty [minutes]’. Robert would not give in: ‘Aim for fifty and if you don’t get it, we’ll drop the workload’. Kevin immediately responds, ‘I think you better drop the workload’.
Robert says, ‘Okay, Kevin, ten minutes now. Dig in. Ten minutes’. Robert takes a blood sample. I note, ‘This is amazing. Watching people push themselves to their absolute max. Watching them do that to themselves. It’s incredible. It’s painful. It makes me uncomfortable’.
Kevin finishes. He cools down a bit. He then comes outside and sits down in a chair for a minute. Robert engages him in a discussion about what the conditions should be for next time (when the trials will no longer be ‘familiarization’). Robert says if they start with X wind speed the whole time, what does Kevin think of going for 180 W for the 50 minutes? Kevin hesitates and offers 160. They compromise at 170 with these conditions. Robert shows Kevin where to shower.
Kevin is a cyclist. Robert is an exercise physiologist. Their world is one of bicycles, muscles, blood samples, and watts. It is a world of movement, endurance, power, and fatigue, a world where the limits of being human are tested and documented daily. Their world is, in a phrase, the science of human performance. The science of human performance is a research area within the interdisciplinary field of exercise science, which, depending upon institutional and national context, can also be called kinesiology, sport science, or human movement science. Where exercise science exists, there are often one or two physical ‘human performance’ laboratories. In these labs, ‘exercise physiologists’ use instruments such as a treadmill and cycle ergometer (stationary bicycle) to study the limits of human physiology, otherwise known as the problem of ‘fatigue’.
At its most basic, exercise physiology is the study of the physiology of bodies in motion. For some exercise physiologists, exercise physiology is, well, just physiology. One exercise physiologist complained during an interview, ‘I hate the term “exercise physiology”. Unless you’re in bed or sitting in a chair, you’re exercising. Exercise is the heart of physiology’. Exercise physiology as a subfield has grown out of a matrix of European and American physical education and hygiene reform movements of the late 19th century, the ‘science of work’ and industrial physiology of the turn of the 20th century, and the rise of sports medicine and amateur and professional sports over the course of the 20th century, with these different antecedents playing a greater or lesser role in the history of the field depending upon the national context (Berryman, 1995; Berryman and Park, 1992; Heggie, 2011).
Today, exercise physiology connotes the study of physiological systems (respiration, biochemistry, cardiovascular activity, skeletal muscles, endocrine system, metabolism, and neural activity) as they relate to human and other animal movement (McKardle et al., 2001). For example, Robert wanted to understand better the effects of heat and humidity upon the fatigue process of a human body in motion. He was also interested in understanding the relationship between heat and fatigue in different parts of the human body, and for this reason measured Kevin’s core (rectal), skin, and muscular temperatures. But why did Robert use Kevin, an established cyclist who comes to the lab wearing his own cycling outfit, as his research subject? Why study an athlete?
The epistemological fragility of the athlete as model
Some exercise physiologists who generalize from the physiology of athletes to other human beings justify their choice of organism precisely because they consider athletes ‘more normal’ than most others. In this sense, athletes are used by physiologists as ‘exemplary’ models. Philosopher and biologist Jessica Bolker (2009) defines exemplary models as ‘species studied as representatives of a broader group [that] most commonly support basic research in which the goal is to elucidate fundamental or general biological patterns and mechanisms’ (p. 487). As one exercise physiologist explained in an interview, ‘[Athletes] are not extreme. They are not superhuman. They teach us what the moving body is. In fact, what people call “normal” today are no longer normal. They are sedentary’. 3 And, while this scientist personally considered research on elite athletes ‘not fashionable anymore’, he admitted that even the study of elite athletes can be useful. ‘If it wasn’t for elite athletes’, the scientist explained, ‘many of the things we know, we wouldn’t know them. They are a good model of study’.
Some physiologists also invoke the concept of ‘amplification’. As amplifications, athletes’ exercising bodies are thought to display human physiology starkly and clearly. For example, one exercise physiologist suggested during an interview that athletes embody a kind of temporal amplification of physiology. He asserted, ‘Athletes are normal. They’re not abnormal. They have just accelerated all these processes, not accelerated, but they represent the end result’. In other words, for these physiologists, athletes are considered both representative (normal) and ideal (amplified). They are conceptualized as representative precisely because they are ideal. 4 However, there is a fine line between ‘ideal’ and ‘abnormal’, a tension that does not go unnoticed by those physiologists who are skeptical of the use of athletes as models, as described below. Interestingly, the principle of amplification allows exercise physiologists to study diseased or ill patients at the same time that they study athletes. Whereas disease is thought to amplify physiology not working, scientists envision athletics as amplifying physiology working particularly well. The continuum of ‘patient – normal – athlete’ remains a strong framework for the justification of exercise science research (and funding) today.
But to contend that athletes are ‘normal’ (because the masses are now abnormally sedentary) or embody physiology working particularly well (as opposed to it not working in patients) may seem like a stretch. In fact, Kevin might be the least likely choice. One could argue that athletes are abnormal, pathological, or even ‘superhuman’ (Geddes, 2007). Indeed, as in the cases of other model organisms, the study of athletes has met with criticism in terms of the athlete’s legitimate generalizability. Physiologists at different points in time over the 20th century concurred that athletes are physiologically different from other human beings in a number of ways, such as heart size, resting heart rate, and, ironically, the latent possibility that the individual is suffering from ‘overtraining syndrome’, a condition of extreme fatigue (Heggie, 2010, 2011; Howe, 2004: 148–163). 5 And there is that elephant in the room: doping. Along with the rise of professional sports and the increasing use among professional and amateur athletes alike of performance-enhancing drugs and other technologies, there would seem to be many possible reasons why exercise physiologists would shy away from studying athletes as model organisms for human physiology. 6
Indeed, a few scientists I interviewed, though comfortable using ‘well-trained’ athletes as subjects (see below), considered the elite athlete’s body today to be so extreme that it no longer amplifies anything. For these scientists, it is as though elite athletes are ‘from Mars’, as one exercise physiologist put it. Another explained, ‘If you investigate someone who is an elite athlete, you’re not going to get something that works for the vast majority. Because they’re not. They’re an outlier from the normal distribution of people’.
In spite of the apparent epistemological fragility of the athlete as model organism, perhaps seen in shaky ‘epistemic scaffolds’ (Nelson, 2013), many physiologists over the last century have used the athlete to study human physiology, and continue to do so. Anthropologist Nicole Nelson (2013) introduced the metaphor of the ‘epistemic scaffold’ to suggest that scientists buttress the validity of animal models with various kinds of claims, claims that can themselves be disputed or torn down. In the case of the athlete as model organism, my ethnographic data suggest that, even as physiologists’ claims about the ‘normality’ of the athlete are posited or disputed (as briefly suggested above), the practical fit of the athlete with fatigue protocols provides one particularly stable scaffold supporting their role as models. In other words, one answer to why Robert chose Kevin as his subject lies in the everyday practice of this particular science, such as the good fit of the athlete with the treadmill and cycle ergometer. Just as C. elegans fit with the microscope or the tobacco mosaic virus fit with the ultracentrifuge, it takes a unique organism to align with the particular experimental instruments and demands of fatigue research. 7 Let us now take a closer look at the athlete as model organism in practice.
The athlete as model organism in practice
In practice, athletes ‘accommodate’ fatigue research and in doing so function as model organisms. Athletes are muscular, follow complex instructions, are familiar with some instruments and protocols, are locally available, have vested interests in the study, and, most importantly, are able to produce repeatable ‘max’ performances. I briefly discuss each of these practical features of the athlete as model organism in turn.
Big veins and visible muscles
First, athletes like Kevin accommodate physiology experiments because they have big veins and visible muscles. This anatomy has an impact on scientific practice. One day, exercise scientists collaborating on one human performance study reminisced about the different phlebotomy courses they had to pass to be certified to carry out their experiments. One researcher recalled his course, during which he had to get checked off for 20 correct procedures on ‘a psych ward full of old people’. He said it was impossible because the old people had really tiny veins. He added, ‘Athletes are easy because their veins are huge’. A third researcher, who was also a pediatric anesthesiologist, added, ‘The hardest is a chubby one-year old kid’. He explained that he often just had to just go with a particular place, that some veins are constant. Someone joked, ‘For athletes you don’t need anatomical knowledge’. Likewise, frequently when a researcher like Robert wanted to apply an electrode to a specific muscle, he just asked the athlete to flex in a certain way. Instantly, distinct muscles would bulge forth. Big, visible veins and muscles make the logistics of inserting needles and attaching electrodes, standard practices in physiology, much easier for athletes than other kinds of people.
Complex instructions
Along with being muscular, another way that athletes accommodate experiment is by following complex instructions, to which Comfort (2009) draws attention in his study of prisoners (p. 197). In one study, measuring cardiac output, oxygen consumption, and several other physiological variables associated with fatigue, subjects were asked to ‘breathe slowly not deeply’ according to a beeping sound, while on a bike, between hard cycling sessions, as they worked their way up to a very difficult workload. Coordinating breathing to hearing is a complex task. In another experiment that considered brain activity and fatigue, subjects were not allowed to blink their eyes, among many other instructions. Athletes are also asked to follow complex instructions during the preparation and calibration phases of a trial. To test electrodes attached to different parts of his body, an athlete would often be asked to perform specific movements. For example, one researcher told his subject, ‘Pull your toes toward you, please. Do a squat for me, please. Pull up for me, please. Hmmm, the rectus femorus isn’t working’.
The most remarkable set of instructions that the athletes were asked to follow was to be totally still at one moment and move as fast as they possibly could at the next. Kevin alternated between sitting still while his body was being hooked up to various instruments, like the BioDex chair or the cannula, to cycling as hard as he could for a grueling 50 minutes. In another study, I watched one subject just sit and stand quietly and patiently for 2 hours as investigators set up, calibrated, and tested various pieces of equipment. But soon, he was cycling to his ‘max’, with an investigator shouting at him ‘Faster! Faster!’ Being asked to be still at one moment and then to move as fast as one possibly can at the next is the defining complex instruction in the science of human performance. (I consider the task of ‘max’ further below.)
Instruments
In ‘Using the Student Body’, historian Heather Prescott (2002) explains how college students became common control subjects of laboratory experiment during the 20th century. Among other factors, Prescott points out that students who were science majors would be familiar with the kinds of apparatus used in experiments. In studies of fatigue, athletes, too, are already familiar with many instruments. For example, both runners and cyclists are familiar with the heart rate monitor. One day, a subject was already wearing his own heart rate monitor from his ride over to the lab, so the researchers just used that one for the trial. It was the same as theirs. Another day, a subject, Tom, was sitting patiently on a table while being hooked up to various instruments. While one scientist shaved Tom’s leg (to place an electrode panel), another scientist, Michael, explained to Tom, ‘Tom, I’m going to slide through this heart rate monitor [under your shirt]’. Tom nodded, ‘Yeah, go ahead’. When the heart rate monitor did not get a reading, Michael teased, ‘You’re a hairy bugger, Tom’. ‘Yeah, I know’. Before Michael could go get a wet napkin to dampen the heart rate monitor and increase the conductivity of the signal, Tom protested, ‘No, man’ and wet his hand with his spit and just ran it along the underside of the heart rate monitor. He shrugged, ‘I’ve got the same one at home’. Michael checked the signal, and it was spot-on.
More importantly, athletes, particularly runners and cyclists, are more likely than others to be familiar with treadmills and cycle ergometers. One of the main accomplishments of exercise physiologists over the course of the 20th century was to develop and standardize instruments and protocols that have enabled the study of fatigue in the laboratory. Two of the key instruments are the treadmill and the cycle ergometer (Figures 4 and 5). Physiologists have regularly used these instruments to produce simple and measurable motions since the early 1900s. Physiologists recruit runners or cyclists, in particular, so that moving on the treadmill and cycle ergometer feels comfortable to the subject, ergo the subject is more likely to work hard in the experiment (and reach ‘max’).
A treadmill protocol.
A cycle ergometer protocol.
Availability, classification, and standardization
Fourth, athletes accommodate experiment and make model organisms in practice because they are locally available. Exercise physiologists working in human performance labs study athletes who are at least ‘well-trained’, and occasionally also ‘sub-elite’ or ‘elite’. Conveniently, well-trained athlete populations are ‘out there’ already. They are out on the streets and trails training and racing regularly. The exercise physiologists’ challenge, then, is to recruit the ‘well-trained’ athletes into the study. There are two ways to do this.
First, unlike researchers who work with other model organisms, like the fruit fly or Arabidopsis, exercise physiologists do not participate in a moral economy involving sharing their organisms with other institutions, nor do they order their organisms from a catalogue or stock center. Rather, exercise physiologists recruit subjects directly through races, posting ads on race websites, or setting up tables at expos. (An ‘expo’, or exposition, is a carnival-like, precompetition display of products and services that simultaneously serves as the registration arena for an event.) Athlete–subjects are then classified into homogeneous subject populations based on their race times (homogeneous in terms of the particular task, that is, people who perform similarly during a fatigue protocol). 8
In this way, the transnational nature of endurance sports such as distance running and cycling, including the standardization of sporting spaces and the circulation of instruments of precision measurement to time races, indirectly creates a mechanism whereby exercise physiologists assume that their organisms are relatively standardized. Indeed, at the same time, as exercise physiology and other subfields within exercise science were developing over the course of the 20th century, many of the spaces of sports competitions were becoming increasingly standardized at the international level (Bale, 1994, 2003: 135). In other words, the relationship between science and sports is intertwined, and exercise physiologists working today take advantage of the standardization of sports as a mechanism to ‘breed’ their model organism.
But exercise physiologists do not recruit all qualifying subjects, and here, one sees an additional epistemological layer to the standardization of the athlete and a moment of ‘resistance’ by some kinds of subjects. Aside from studies explicitly designed to study women or gender, most human performance subjects are men. In fact, all of the subjects I met during my research, at all three field sites, were men. I asked the scientists about the gendering of their subject population. The scientists (men and women alike) explained that if they chose to include female subjects in a study, which they could theoretically, they would have to be sure to test the woman at the same time of her menstrual cycle for each trial so that the hormonal fluctuations in her body would not introduce an additional physiological variable into the study. In a field that involves repeated experiment on the same subject (see below), human performance scientists would only be able to do one trial per subject per month. Studying men, they contend, is just easier and faster. In this sense, women’s bodies (as conceptualized) ‘resist’ these experiments. Mirroring general trends in the history of the scientific construction of the female body as inherently variable, uncontrollable, or abnormal, female athletes are imagined as physiologically ‘variable’ by default, not the ‘standard’ necessary in these studies (Haraway, 1991; Harlow, 1986; Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, 1973). The standard athlete model is not just well trained, but also male.
A second way exercise physiologists recruit athlete–subjects is through local sports clubs and by word of mouth through training partners. An American scientist knew several of his subjects from cycling in their city. One scientist in South Africa assured colleagues that he would be going out for a ride with some guys over the weekend and would recruit some subjects then. A British scientist met one of his subjects at his local gym. They eventually went on a few runs together (before the runner was recruited). Through these informal networks, scientists tap into a community of athletes whose training levels are easy for the scientist to determine, because they train and race together.
Here, the local social and geographical context of the laboratories is important. The American and South African labs were located in cities that boast mild climates and large, year-round cycling and running communities. As one scientist put it simply, ‘[Ours] is a very active city. That helps. The cycling community’s pretty large here, so that helps’. Another noted, I think one of the good things about [our city] is there’s plenty of endurance athletes that are around to ask for subjects. We have a pretty good pool of subjects. A lot of them are pretty interested and want to get into the studies. And some of [the studies] are pretty grueling and they still want to keep doing it [laughing].
At the British field site, however, while ‘well-trained’ athletes are relatively easy to find, exercise physiologists bemoaned a striking lack of elite runners, providing the local context that encourages one scientist and his colleagues to travel to East Africa to study fatigue among elite distance runners. It is one of these East African runners who is depicted in the biology department’s website montage alongside Drosophila. In other words, while the athlete populations are ‘out there’ already, the precise configuration of available athlete–subjects – from elite to ‘well-trained’, from cyclist to runner to neither – depends upon the local context of the lab.
Vested interests
Along with their anatomical advantages for some kinds of experiments, ability to follow complex instructions, familiarity with key instruments, and availability, athletes’ vested interests in the studies make them a model organism in practice. Comfort (2009) emphasizes how the prisoners at the Stateville Penitentiary had vested interests that drove their participation in the malaria experiments. The prisoners were motivated by money, amenities, suspension of discipline, and early release (Comfort, 2009). Athletes, too, have specific reasons for participating in experiments, though none so dreadful as avoiding solitary confinement. As mentioned, scientists have devised particular protocols and experimental techniques to answer the question of fatigue. One of the key kinds of protocols is the ‘max’ protocol, in which a subject is asked to physically move until he cannot any longer, basically without dying or seriously injuring himself. Think of the ‘MVC’ or the familiarization protocol described earlier. Other tests are called things like ‘peak power output’, ‘VO2 Max’, or ‘lactic threshold’. The idea is that by tracking a subject’s physiology on his way to max, peak, or threshold, scientists gain insight into the physiology of human fatigue, survival, and endurance. One exercise physiologist noted in a lab meeting, ‘They’re fine one minute; they’re “dead” at six minutes. They’re on their way to failing; their systems are failing. That’s the premise’.
Only certain subject populations are willing to carry out these protocols. Athletes are willing because they are interested in the results, and they want a good workout, called the ‘training benefit’ of participation. To be a training benefit, the study must not interfere with the subject’s already established training and racing schedules. During one informed consent session, a potential athlete–subject asked, ‘How much it will it affect me? I have provincial champs this weekend and then national champs next weekend’. Satisfied with the PI’s response, the subject knew exactly when he wanted to do his sessions: ‘Can I do Wednesday and Monday at 6 p.m.?’ The PI agreed and also confirmed that the compensation would only be US$15, explaining that this study is not sponsored, so it is really ‘just for science’, as he put it. The athlete was fine with that. Interestingly, with vested interests not primarily monetary but athletic (and perhaps, ‘for science’), athletes’ motivations resemble more closely those of patients, who seek a ‘therapeutic benefit’, than ‘healthy normals’, who value financial compensation (Abadie, 2010; Fisher, 2009; Petryna, 2009).
Phenomenological familiarity
Well-trained athletes also accommodate fatigue protocols because they are familiar with quantified assessments of their bodies and performances. For example, a cyclist is familiar with the phenomenology of different cadences (how fast he is pedaling), measured in revolutions per minute, and can adjust his cadence on command. Likewise, many runners are familiar with feeling and producing different paces, as measured in minutes per kilometer or mile. In addition, athletes are not confused when asked to give a certain level effort, such as 50, 70, or 100 percent, as Kevin was requested to do during the MVCs.
Mr Jones was the exception that proves the rule. Mr Jones had been recruited to participate in a study of patients with a condition affecting blood flow to the legs. (Eventually, the scientist would compare the physiological results of the patients with those of the athletes. I had been following the work with the athletes when the opportunity to observe trials with Mr Jones arose.) During the familiarization trial, the scientist asked Mr Jones to go at 50 percent to warmup. He protested, insisting, ‘How do I know what fifty percent is?’ The scientist posed the question differently, ‘Okay, can you do twenty-five percent of your max?’ Mr Jones just stared at him. ‘Okay, on a scale of one to ten, I’d like you to push at a two’. Eventually, Mr Jones gave up protesting and just tried to estimate as best he could. (In fairness to both Mr Jones and the scientist, I should reiterate that this is the point of such a familiarization trial, to make familiar the unfamiliar aspects of the scientific protocol. I also want to note that whereas the scientists were on a first name basis with the athlete–subjects, all referred to ‘Mr Jones’ as ‘Mr Jones’. I do not know whether this was because Mr Jones was older, not an athlete, or for some other reason.)
Athletes are model organisms in practice also because they respond to a particular motivational script. Athletes are used to being yelled at, as in, ‘Push, push, push! Go, go, go! C’mon, dig deep. Dig deep’, and so on. Screaming is an everyday thing in a human performance laboratory, from the ‘Push! Push!’ during an MVC to the ‘Dig in!’ of a max test on a treadmill or cycle ergometer. All of the scientists I worked with used this motivational script of cheering and screaming. And the athletes, as they do in their races, reacted by pushing, pulling, going, kicking, and digging on cue. Once again, the social worlds of science and sports appear intertwined, as the scientists mimic coaches and the athletes respond.
The resulting human performances elicited are remarkable. A typical max scenario, remember, involves a subject running or cycling, face red and blotchy, drenched in sweat, a look of both pain and determination on his face. The scientist begins shouting, ‘Keep it going! You can do it!’ The subject begins really struggling. Scientists ‘take measures’, such as heart rate values or blood draws. They begin to doubt whether the subject will last much longer. The cheering in the lab becomes deafening, only challenged by the loud breathing of the subject, gasping to breathe more oxygen. Then, suddenly, the subject stops cycling or jumps off the treadmill. The trial is over. The subject is wasted, defeated. The scientists are happy. They have recorded the fatigue process once again.
This much is clear: scientists need athletes for these protocols. They need subjects used to pain, to pushing themselves, to feeling ‘max’ in their everyday lives. And they need subjects who want to feel these things (on the ‘positive pain’ of sport, see Howe, 2004: 85–88, 154–155). Consider the example of Lars.
A few days after Kevin, Lars went through the same familiarization trial in the environmental chamber of the Human Performance Laboratory. Well into the cycling protocol, Lars admits, ‘I’m feeling light-headed’. Robert asks, ‘Shall I drop it ten watts?’ Lars murmurs, ‘Yeah’. Suddenly, Robert stops the trial. He is helping Lars get off the bike. He asks me for Lars’ core temperature. I am trying to read the appropriate instrument (connected to a thermometer encased in a probe that is inserted into the subject’s rectum and remains there throughout the experiment). I do not realize, but it’s serious, and Robert is yelling at me to open the door. I am briefly torn as to whether I should be getting the core temperature or helping with the door. He yells at me again to open the door. I spring up and do so. He walks Lars outside the chamber and has him lay down. They elevate his legs and put something under his head. Robert gets the instrument from the chamber and takes his core temperature.
Lars stays lying there for a while. I am scared. After a while, he is sufficiently recovered to walk to the BioDex chamber. Rolly, another exercise scientist, explains to Lars as we go, ‘This is crucial now. You were so near your limit that this is vital, vital data’. I cannot watch the 100-second MVC. It looks too painful. Lars says later that his stomach was cramping up as he was doing it. Afterward, Rolly comments, ‘Fantastic trial […] very good. Few people can make themselves go that far’.
Lars’ collapse and painful MVC is not where the story ends. After the trial, Lars biked to his friend’s house as he had planned, in a town about 18 miles away – even though Robert lived in that same town and offered Lars a ride. The point is that, even after collapsing during the trial, Lars did not alter his typical routine of cycling home. ‘Well-trained’ athletes are model organisms in practice because pushing one’s self to one’s ‘max’ is a part of their everyday life.
It is no wonder that the 1922 Nobel Prize-winning physiologist A.V. Hill defended his selection of the athlete as research subject as follows: The complaint has been made to me – ‘why investigate athletics, why not study the processes of industry or of disease?’ The answer is twofold. (1) The processes of athletics are simple and measurable and carried out to a constant degree, namely to the utmost of man’s powers: those of industry are not; and (2) athletes themselves, being in a state of health and dynamic equilibrium, can be experimented on without danger and can repeat their performances exactly again and again. (Hill, 1927: 3)
Hill appreciated that athletes ‘can be experimented on without danger’. In addition, Hill found athletes to be model organisms for the study of fatigue because they are capable of re-producing these performances ‘exactly again and again’.
Able to produce repeatable ‘max’ performances
Finally, well-trained athletes accommodate physiologists’ fatigue experiments because their performances are considered replicable. Replicable performances have two consequences in practice. First, the athlete’s perceived ability to replicate his performance means the researchers can calibrate their instruments against the athlete’s performances. This is a particular case of the use of the body of an experimental organism as a measuring tool (Löwy, 2000). Exercise physiologists work backward from the knowledge that well-trained athletes can repeat their performances to determine that the data at the end of a study reflect the experimental intervention not just variability in an instrument or a less-than-cooperative subject.
Second, and related, the athlete’s perceived ability to replicate his performance means that physiologists can use individual subjects as both control and experimental subjects. They can create a ‘control’ condition and an ‘experimental’ condition to investigate the phenomenon of fatigue and have the subject do the same protocol in each. Subjects often participate in six, eight, sometimes up to ten trials. The importance of having a well-trained athlete is that he will not experience a ‘training effect’ or learning curve from simply doing the protocol over and over in the study. A novice runner or cyclist may improve over the course of multiple trials simply from exposure to the activities of running or cycling, rather than from the study intervention.
The biosociality of the human performance lab: Self-experimentation and the pleasure of exercise
Before concluding, I want to point out one final aspect of scientific practice in human performance laboratories: self-experimentation. The pervasiveness of self-experimentation was, for me, unexpected and provides an interesting contribution of the case of the athlete to the model organism literature by bringing into relief that ways that the standardization of the model can be intimately intertwined with the standardization of the researcher. All of the scientists I have mentioned so far experimented on themselves. While self-experimentation has waned in most sciences over the course of the 20th century, today self-experimentation continues to be a common practice in human performance laboratories (Goodman et al., 2003: 2; Herzig, 2005; on the history of self-experimentation in physiology, see Altman, 1998: 214–239; Dendy and Boring, 2005; Oreskes, 1996: 105–109). 9
Exercise physiologists regularly pilot instruments and protocols on themselves, volunteer for each other’s studies, and even act as subjects in their own studies. For example, one day at one field site, the physiologists tested a piece of equipment on a visiting researcher, José, in the environmental chamber downstairs. They then decided to test the same piece of equipment back upstairs in the human performance laboratory as well. Leaving the electrodes and wires on José, the group moved to the elevators to head upstairs. As we exited the elevators, we bumped into some of the scientists from another lab in the department. One of them joked, ‘Why do we always see you guys with wires all over your bodies?’ The PI replied, ‘José’s our subject’. The guy from the other lab teased, ‘Right now? What are you measuring? The effects of going up and down in the elevator?’ Another day, at a different field site, I witnessed scientist A test scientist B for one study, then scientist B test himself for his own study, and then scientist B collaborated with scientist D (who had piloted for scientist A 2 days prior) on a third study.
Why do they study themselves? My ethnographic data suggest three reasons that can only be itemized here (for more justifications for self-experimentation, see Altman, 1998: 303–309; Oreskes, 1996: 108). First, self-experimentation is convenient. Unlike their subjects, human performance scientists practically live at the lab, so scheduling is unproblematic. (Working with human subjects means dealing with many ‘lates’ and ‘no-shows’.) At one site, an exercise physiologist could email his colleagues ‘Please be available for testing on Wednesday and Thursday from about 1 to 5 pm’. Second, self-experimentation allows scientists to pilot, tinker with, and feel their way through a protocol. Robert piloted on himself all of the max protocols and conditions of his heat study. Third, and related, self-experimentation reflects an ethic of not asking someone to do something that one has not done himself. ‘I like to as much as possible experience what these things feel like, so the feeling of absolute exhaustion’, one scientist shared, adding, ‘I will never ever ask anyone to do anything until I’ve done it myself’. A scientist from another lab stated positively, [U]nless you’ve done it yourself, unless you’ve gone through the VO2 Max test, unless you’ve taken yourself to fatigue, unless you’ve had that muscle biopsy and those type of things, you can’t appreciate what the individual is doing, and you can’t, I think you just may be unrealistic with expectations.
Of course, for the argument that the athlete is a model organism to make sense, for the scientists to be able to pilot these protocols or participate as subjects in fatigue research, the scientists must themselves be athletes. And they are.
The scientist–athlete as model organism
In two of my field sites, almost all of the scientists were themselves serious athletes, even ‘elite’. In the third site, the athletic trend was not quite as strong. During interviews, scientists described to me their personal athletic history, often unsolicited. Their sports ranged from cycling, running, swimming, and triathlon to kayaking, rock climbing, rugby, volleyball, basketball, cricket, gymnastics, tennis, squash, field hockey, football/soccer, and horseback riding. They were or had been recreational, semiprofessional, nationally ranked, and world-class athletes. On Mondays, exercise physiologists typically discussed what races they had participated in over the weekend or where they went to train. It surprised no one when a prospective graduate student visiting one of the departments was also trying to ‘go pro’ as a cyclist. While it was an amazing experience for me to witness physiologists ask athletes like Kevin and Lars to go to their max, it was even more amazing to see scientists like Robert and Michael then strip off their clothes, hop on the bike or the treadmill, and push themselves to their max as well.
Most scientists were clear in interviews that they did not think one has to be an athlete to be a good human performance scientist. Nonetheless, there remains embedded in the work culture of exercise physiology more generally a profound valorization of exercise. Historian Bruce Hevly (1996) has noted how a sporting, masculine ideal pervaded the study of glaciers in the 19th century. Likewise, in the study of human performance today, chemistry between the scientists and subjects emerges as a result of a shared phenomenological universe, a shared physical and moral culture. The center of that universe, in the lab and in society, is human movement. In other words, the ethic of self-experimentation is tied to another ethic: exercise itself.
The athlete–subjects and scientist–athlete–subjects appreciate each other’s suffering when pushing themselves to the limit in and outside of the laboratory. One scientist (who was also a runner, cyclist, and speed skater) explained that, as an athlete, he understood that they do that for fun, like they choose to for free to participate. So if you have a sport background, it makes it easier to see what they’re going through and what they’re willing to go through and what they’re not willing to go through.
This scientist empathized with his subjects’ willingness to endure. Historian Naomi Oreskes (1996) notes that values other than objectivity, values like heroism, stoicism, and endurance, can fuel scientific research (see also Hevly, 1996). While Oreskes mainly draws attention to how these values played out in the field sciences in the early 20th century, the case of exercise physiology demonstrates that scientific practice inside the laboratory can align with such values as well.
In the words of anthropologist and social theorist Paul Rabinow (1996), one might consider the scientists and their model organisms to share a form of ‘biosociality’, or a social and moral identity and sense of collectivity anchored in one’s physicality. Following the work of Rabinow, science studies scholars have illustrated how people suffering from various diseases may share a biosocial identity. In the case of fatigue research and the science of human performance, the label of biosociality makes sense. This biosociality, along with the numerous ways in which athletes accommodate the experimental demands of fatigue research, helps drive the selection of athletes as model organisms.
The shared phenomenological universe, ethic of exercise, and biosociality is not just about enduring pain or about heroism and stoicism; it is also about pleasure and joy. One exercise physiologist remarked that both the scientists and subjects actually enjoy exercise and that this joy creates a special kind of atmosphere in the laboratory. His words capture the shared moral and physical nature of fatigue research in a human performance laboratory: You get all these people in the same room who are just really into exercise, for different reasons, and it just ends up, that creates an atmosphere that makes it really, really fun. It’s fun for the subjects to be the ones doing it – even when it’s really really difficult and they are really fatigued in a trial. And it also makes it fun for the researchers, because we like exercise ourselves and we like doing it ourselves, and now here’s a way for us to actually look at what exercise does, what’s happening in someone when they actually do it.
Another exercise physiologist suggested, somewhat cynically, that the study of elite athletes is fun because it is a kind of voyeurism: ‘Why do it, really? Studying athletes is almost voyeurism. It’s studying the greats. Picasso, Tolstoy, it’s the same thing with the elite marathoner’. He went on to paraphrase a scene from the movie Chariots of Fire in which two runners are talking. One is pondering his future as a missionary and observes, ‘God made me to be a missionary in China. But he almost made me fast’. ‘It’s the same thing’, the physiologist continued, ‘It’s an almost sensual thing, being that close to being fast. If you can’t go that fast yourself, it’s almost a pleasure to be near someone who can – or to take a measure’.
A scientist from a different field site explained the pleasure the subject experiences almost in the same voyeuristic terms. Reflecting on the research ethics approval process and the demand to explain to Institutional Review Board (IRB) panels the benefit to subjects of participating in fatigue studies, the scientist smiled, ‘In the exercise trials, the benefit, it’s almost like there is no benefit [beyond pleasure]’. He continued, You can’t put that in your proposal, but you almost just want to tell the committee people, [the well-trained athletes] are just so keen. … They probably had aspirations to be a professional athlete. So for them, it’s still living, or reliving, sort of that dream. That’s all the benefit they need to keep coming back and getting a needle shoved in their arm.
After providing his twofold answer to the question, ‘Why investigate athletics?’ quoted above, Hill (1927) added another reason for the study of athletes as an afterthought. ‘I might perhaps state a third reason’, the famous physiologist continued, ‘That the study of athletes and athletics is “amusing”: certainly to us and sometimes I hope to them’ (Hill, 1927: 3). In other words, Hill added that the study of athletes is fun – not just for the physiologists but also for the subjects.
Conclusion
Introducing the case of the athlete as model organism, I posed several questions: If the athlete is a model, what is he a model of? Equally important, how does the athlete function as a model in practice? And, where, or how, does ‘the athlete’ fit among Drosophila, Arabidopsis, and C. elegans, or patients, prisoners, and other captive populations?
Answering the first two questions is straightforward. This article has argued that scientists of human performance study human movement and investigate the nature of fatigue. These scientists, exercise physiologists, create experimental protocols that require subjects to perform at their ‘max’ or ‘peak’ or ‘threshold’, as in the anecdotes described above. Under these extreme conditions, some exercise physiologists believe that the mysteries of fatigue are amplified – and therefore easier to witness and document. For this same reason, physiologists often study athletes – muscular, interested, familiar athletes – who are capable of producing reliable, repeatable performances under extreme situations of fatigue.
Answering the third question – where do athletes fit among a slew of other nonhuman and human model organisms – is more difficult. You will have noticed, I shifted between labeling the athletes ‘organisms’ and ‘subjects’. The specific case of the athlete as model ‘organism–subject’ is provocative for three reasons. First, as described above, there seem to be theoretical limitations to generalizing from the physiology of fatigue in athletes to other humans. One could argue that athletes are ‘outliers’, as one scientist put it. However, to label exercise physiologists as naïve for not taking the outlier status of athletes (and the doping issue) more seriously might be too easy. The fact that experimentation on ‘well-trained’ athletes persists invites us to look deeper to understand the value of the athlete–subject. My ethnographic data suggest that the practical aspects of working with a particular organism are not only necessary for it to be a model but also might even be powerful enough to overshadow potential limitations in generalizability. Moreover, it might overshadow potential opportunities, as in the case of working with female subjects.
Second, the athlete as model organism–subject brings unique practical features to an experiment, not least of which is the potential for the organism–subject to take on multiple roles in the study, such as collaborator or technician. Kevin’s trial was a negotiation and collaboration. After he had just pushed himself almost to collapse, Kevin did not walk away from the study exclaiming, ‘You guys are insane!’, which many of us might have done, but rather negotiated with Robert the conditions of the next trial. In this sense, this case echoes that of the Stateville prisoners, who became subjects, technicians, and even co-investigators (Comfort, 2009). However, unlike in the case of the prisoners – or even in the cases of patients and the poor – in the experiments I describe, the organism–subjects need not enter the laboratory with little social, economic, or physical capital. Indeed, the case of the athlete as model organism–subject might be rare among human subjects research in that the power differential between scientists and subjects is more ambiguous, with the subjects having social capital and the researchers being emotionally engaged peers (or fans) of their subjects.
In fact, because the scientists are often athletes, they, too, can be subjects. Robert piloted every condition of his heat study on himself. In this field, self-experimentation is the norm, and many exercise physiologists draw heavily from their embodied knowledge of human movement to design and implement studies. As a result, the scientists, too, take on multiple roles – investigator, spectator, and subject – and an intimate feedback loop plays out in practice, with the line between scientist and model organism–subject blurring within and beyond the laboratory. This feedback loop is a more immediate one than that described by philosopher Ian Hacking (1995). In ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, Hacking refers to the ways in which the scientific study of human beings leads to the classification of people and, in doing so, creates and limits forms of subjectivity, identity, and even biology available to people at different points in time. In the human performance laboratory, the ‘looping effect’ produced by studying the athlete as model organism is a particular experimental mode that leads to the scientist himself as subject and the subject as scientist. Then again, the case of the athlete as model organism–subject, and the blurring of roles and feedback between scientist and subject in the laboratory may not be so rare. More ethnographies of the practice of nonmedical human experimentation are needed.
Third, and related, the case of the athlete as model organism–subject extends previous scholarship on the importance of model organism communities. Historians of science have documented how a community and ‘moral economy’ develops around model organisms, in part to help circulate and standardize the organism. In the case of the athlete, the model organism–subjects actively participate in this community, and the community is driven not by an ethic of sharing and exchange but by an ethic rooted in physical experience, a biosociality.
One reason for the different community ethic surrounding this model organism is that the athlete as model organism–subject can be envisioned as entering the laboratory ‘pre-standardized’ – in terms of training status – because endurance sports like cycling and running are themselves subject to a great deal of standardization. In this way, exercise physiologists take advantage of – and fuel – the entanglement of modern science and modern sport. This approach to standardizing their organism–subject may not be unique to exercise physiology. Other kinds of human beings are conceptualized by scientists as arriving pre-standardized to the lab as well. Human subjects are often selected for scientific research based on ethnicity, age, gender, smoking or marital status, and so on. It is interesting to investigate which aspects of being human a particular group of scientists temporarily ignores, holds constant, or highlights for the purposes of a study and whether those aspects of being human ‘accommodate’ or ‘resist’ the kind of biosocial relationship between scientist and subject described in human performance research. How scientists devise research protocols and recruitment strategies to create homogeneous subject populations (around selected aspects of being human) is also interesting. In this case, transnational material and social infrastructures make it possible for ‘well-trained’ athletes to be conceptualized as standardized. In addition, intellectual infrastructures make it possible to exclude women as subjects and ensure that this biosocial community is gendered male.
A productive tension emerges by applying the model organism frame to human experimentation. At first glance, the term ‘model organism’, usually associated with plants and animals, appears inherently dehumanizing because it does not reserve a special status for human beings. However, rather than obscure the distinction between human and animal subjects, this article shows that the model organism framework has the potential to highlight differences between humans and other model organisms. For example, I have suggested that the interactivity of the athlete is not divorced from his utility as a model organism but rather constitutive of it.
Finally, the case of the athlete as model organism–subject is provocative in and of itself. The case highlights that, just as subjects and scientists can perform different roles, so, too, can scientific practice. In the particular case of exercise physiology, laboratory experiments provide a means to create knowledge about fatigue but are also a way to train hard, have fun, and approximate greatness, for scientists and subjects alike. The laboratory itself emerges as a site of human performance, a dramatic place where physiologists and athletes join together to push up against the limits of being human and get close to excellence – ‘or at least take a measure’.
The ethnographic approach provided a valuable tool for capturing this multifaceted nature of the human performance lab, as well as for revealing the degree of self-experimentation present in this field and, above all, for documenting how the athlete functions as a model organism in practice. And here, I have to confess that my field notes from Kevin’s and Lars’ trials are not entirely representative. I used these particular notes because in them I am not yet desensitized to the experience of watching human beings push themselves to their limits. At the time of their writing, I was still shocked by the sight of a little blood and I still experienced unanticipated moments in the lab as chaotic and disconcerting. Over the course of my fieldwork, however, I would come to experience sweat and blood, screaming and grunting, and reaching for water and gasping for air as regular parts of this particular science, and my notes would lose their tone of shock and discomfort. They are regular parts of this science because they – sweat and blood, screaming and grunting, reaching for water, and gasping for air – are parts of the limits of being human. One of the technicians who ran a hyperbaric chamber (where I followed a study), commented during a max test, ‘It sounds like a labor ward in there’. This is an apt comparison. At the end of the day, the science of human performance is about amplifying the processes of life and death; it is about understanding human survival, human endurance. Thus. I used these particular notes because it is important to remember what ‘fatigue’, ‘max’, ‘peak’, and so on look like in practice in the laboratory. They look like Kevin’s red and blotchy, defeated, frustrated face. They look like Robert helping a limp, soaking wet Lars off the bike. They look like clipboards thrown down and doors thrown open. To the uninitiated, they look chaotic and even scary. It is important to remember that human beings pushing themselves to their max can be beautiful but also disconcerting. And, ultimately, it is because they are investigating humans at their limits – and what that experimental practice entails for researchers and subjects alike – that the story of these scientists and their model organisms deserves to be told.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge first and foremost the generosity of the scientists and subjects who permitted her to enter the laboratory with them and observe their work. Colleagues in the program in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania helped greatly with several different versions of this material. Several anonymous reviewers, as well as editors Mike Lynch and Sergio Sismondo, also provided valuable critical feedback on previous drafts of this article.
Funding
The research for this article was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number 0620419) and the Helfand Graduate Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Health. Funding for additional research and writing was provided by the History and Sociology of Science program and School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.