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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!
... 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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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.
If you can't feel pain, you have leprosy. Then you can hurt yourself and you'll never notice
the damage.
If the consequence of you not knowing C++ was me strapping you to a table and repeatedly pouring oxidising chemicals into your eyes would you prefer me to give you the benefit of the doubt?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
I think he's asking to be modded down, because that is so obviously un-funny :)