Pain-free mice

mccalli writes: "Not input devices, but real live squeaky things. Apparently, Canadian scientists are trying to breed mice that do not feel pain. The eventual goal is a better pain killer for humans, but this is said to be a long way off. More in the Nature article here."

There are people born like this, actually...

[Ieshan]

They die at a very young age, it's an extremely serious disorder. If you don't feel pain, when your skeleton or muscles are in a position where they are enduring pressure or other outside forces, being damaged, or otherwise, you don't adjust the problem. Therefore, the people have horrible defects caused by this - imagine sleeping completely crooked for thirty days in a row.

Also, it's likely for them to die as young children, in all seriousness, especially in today's society, where clothes cover most of the body (and hide potential injuries) and the child will not scream in pain.

Implications of this research.

[Guppy]

I'm seeing a lot of "Pain is good/useful" and "Animal experimentation is bad" posts. I believe the implications of this research could be much broader.

In the US, pain has traditionally been undertreated. The reason is that the most effective agents for chronic and severe pain, narcotics, are tightly controlled (for obvious reasons). Doctors which write more prescriptions than average quickly find themselves the object of regulatory scrutiny, while patients who ask for narcotics may be suspected of being addicts.

In recent times, this has started to ease a little bit (especially for Cancer and terminal diseases), however, it's still very much a problem in cases where diagnosing the severity of the pain relies on the patient's own testimony (Such as for many nerve conditions), or where a chronic conditions requires long-term use of painkillers. It's also a problem for minorities and the poor, who especially tend to be undertreated.

The writers of this Nature article have been careful to note that there are no immediate practical applications from this research -- having pain-free mice running around simply isn't all that useful. However, although there were guesses as to the function of DREAM [the protein of interest], as the article states, prior to this work "It was very unpredictable what DREAM would be doing physiologically".

So, now what you have is a target gene and protein in hand, with which you can do things like obtain structural information, or design high-throughput in-vitro screens for drug development. The eventual goal would be something which works as a powerful painkiller, yet does not have any addictive potential -- thus allowing it to be used more freely. And even if this particular target doesn't lead to such a drug, it illuminates another part of the complex, and still poorly understood, process by which we feel pain.