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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."
I think one of the reasons we feel pain is so that we don't do stupid things...
Be very close to fire.
Touch very sharp things.
Drink/spill other people's pints, or look at their women
So if we now have painkillers that kill all pain, there are going to be a lot of mutillated people in future generations!
Moderators, you know what to do.
... would be a pain killer that could cure a broken heart ...
O=='=++
Then my weekly trips to Madame Zora's house of punishment would be a complete waste of time and money. I *like* my pain, dammit!
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...always works wonders.
Nothing like holding the hair of some chick you just met, whose name you don't know, while she ralphs.
so now the poor mice will be diseccted while alive
animals are concious dammit
they are not an IT
I hope whoever is "inventing" this gets plenty of pain
.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
So, I'm guessing that this will be the end of PETA's objections to animal testing. Right? Yes?
Liberty uber alles.
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.
...that the guy from Monty Python can finish his symphony on the "mouse-organ" without getting dragged offstage?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
I was hoping for an RSI preventing mouse
If you can't feel pain, you have leprosy. Then you can hurt yourself and you'll never notice
the damage.
But realistically, any time you use your wrist to move the mouse you are doing damage to the area. Mice, rather than keyboards, have been pegged as the main contributor to carpal tunnel syndrome.
If you want a pain free mouse, use a trackball.
DAMN!! Now my S&M fetish will be meaningless.....
As others have raised, it would be quite suicidal to create a human that feels no pain. Pain is an immediate reaction to dangerous and often deadly situations.
What's preventing someone from bleeding to death if they're so doped up they can't feel the open wound ? It's happened to PCP abusers (w00t!), who would go berzerk and ram their foot/fist/head into a wall with a sick laugh "I'll kill you, you fucking brick wall!".
If they can't figure out how to _selectively_ discard certain types of pain, like arthritis pain or headaches, then perhaps it would be a good compromise to just reduce the pain to an unobtrusive level, or make it fade away very quickly. In that scenario, suppose you cut your finger while mutilating a head of lettuce, you would instantly feel the pain surge, warning you of the injury, but the feeling would attenuate very quickly so as to not incapacitate your nervous system and hinder your ability to react in an intelligent and timely manner.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
... they've been offering lobotomies for years now.
Guy 1: animals can program in C++ dammit
Guy 2: What do you base that on?
Guy 1: Last time I looked, I was one!
Guy 2: touché...
Isn't it called 'alcohal'?
Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back!
Pain is nature's way of saying something is wrong. Without it, a person could have a heart attack and not know until they are already dead (then again if they were dead how would they know?)
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
If someone were to not feel pain, they would lack the necessary measure of self-preservation which allows us to survive. Pain is feedback that is an integral part of an organism's self-organization.
People ran into this problem when Angeldust was popular years ago: when someone feels invulnerable, they act invulnerable, and when they act invulnerable, they soon discover that they are not, and they get severely injured. Or they die.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
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.