High on the list of candidates for most appalling news story of the week (American society division) was one published Sunday in The New York Times and headlined “Born to Run? Little Ones Get Test for Sports Gene.” It described a new $149 test marketed by Atlas Sports Genetics of Boulder, Colo., that tries to identify a child's natural athletic gifts.

The test, which consists of analyzing DNA obtained by swabbing the inside of a child's cheek and along the gums, purportedly can predict whether the youngster is best suited to sports requiring power and speed, or to endurance sports like distance running, or to some combination of the two. The headline aptly alluded to the targeted age group -- “little ones” being those between infancy and about 8 years old, for whom physical tests to predict future athletic prowess are unreliable.

Outside experts consulted for the story disputed whether the gene analyzed, ACTN3, really tells anything much about athletic predisposition in children, although a 2003 study by Australian researchers suggested that it was linked to elite athletic performance.

On this question we are agnostic. But the scientific disagreement is perhaps beside the point, because as creepy as the whole thing sounds (somehow the words “master race” come uncomfortably to mind), some parents interviewed sounded intrigued. One mother, attending her 2½-year-old son's soccer class, said, “I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it's good to match them with the right activity. I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration.”

Well, yes, we suppose that's an important concern, although having been exposed to a certain amount of parental frustration in our day, we're bound to say that inadvertently matching your kid with the wrong sport doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of potential sources of exasperation.

And the cost of college being what it is -- astronomical -- parents might well be tempted to try to identify a precocious little athlete who, with the right training, could eventually secure a free ride to an athletically or academically elite institution of higher learning. Not to mention that in a down economy, the lucrative contracts given to professional athletes might be an added incentive to go the DNA route.

These are temptations that ought to be resisted, and not only because the potential pool of elite athletes is pretty small to begin with and they have a way of making themselves known when the time comes.

More to the point is that trying a variety of sports is one of the ways in which youngsters find out about themselves. Channeling them into a single sport at an early age on the basis of a purported genetic predisposition might well rob them of the joys and, yes, the frustrations that are inextricably bound up in athletic endeavor. It is axiomatic in sports that athletes often learn far more from their failures than from their successes. It's not always the best thing to be The Natural, or to know it ahead of time.