from wired.com So you find a surgeon willing to drill a series of small holes in the humerus and ulna bones at your elbow, slice open your wrist and remove a tendon from it, and then weave the tendon in a �figure eight loop through the holes. After a year or so of rehab, you're throwing a 97-mph fastball for the first time in your life, and your career is transformed. This is not a hypothetical situation. This particular elbow surgery has been a standard procedure in sports since the mid-'70s, when it was performed on Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Tommy John. (He opted for the then-�experimental operation after suffering a potentially career-�ending torn ligament in his left elbow.) One in nine major-league pitchers active in 2001 and 2002 carried the scars of Tommy John surgery, as it is now called, including Chicago Cubs ace Kerry Wood, who reached his top velocity as a pitcher after recovering from the procedure. . . . snip . . . The surgical procedures that are now in beta will only make the ethical questions murkier. "We've been doing some of these procedures for 30 years," says Freddie Fu, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh. "But we're only now starting to understand kinematics and mobility. In the next five to ten years, we're really going to understand how, say, the knee works in all three dimensions." In a decade, a quarter�back might have muscle cells removed from his legs. Those cells would then be engineered in the lab to be stronger and re�inserted, enabling a quarterback with the wisdom of a 35-year-old to run like he's 20. The same technique could be used around shoulder joints, adding power and durability to the arms of pitchers, weight lifters, and volleyball players. (Some sports medicine experts believe stem cells might be manipulated to grow even more enhanced replacement cells.) As minimally invasive and arthroscopic techniques improve, surgeons will be able to tweak bicyclists' hearts to increas stroke volume and reroute digestive systems to optimize energy absorption. more at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/start.html?pg=2

Outlaw them altogether. The are death and there is absolutely no place for them in sports or anywhere else in "entertainment." It's just that simple!