Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Find New Painkiller From Saliva
dptalia writes "Scientists have found a new pain killer based on human saliva. Apparently 1 gram of the new drug provides as much pain blocking as 3 grams of morphine. The drug blocks the breakdown of the body's natural pain killing mechanism. Scientists say the molecule is simple and synthesis is expected to be simple."
When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats' paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine.
Well wouldn't you say anything to make them stop spitting on you?
"No more, yes alright it works I'm not in pain anymore."
Moving out of cuckoo land, I have a twisted ankle after a fall yesterday should I hock a loogie onto it?
liqbase
Just when I'd kicked my morphine habit, now I'm going to get jailed for posession of saliva.
'cos morphine rules !!
I was in hospital one time after an operation and I was on a self administered morhine drip. But it would only give 1mg every 2 minutes (or whatever is the appropriate dose). But the machine also logs how many times you press the button so the staff can see how much pain you think you're in.
So I wouldn't have to count, I pressed the button every time the track changed on my mp3 player. Best hospital visit evar!!!1
I was lying there one time, opened my eyes and the Everquest HUD was there. In the chat window I was being spammed with :
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
You need to go to the toilet.
Eventually I went and everybody who spoke on the journey, their chat came up in the window.
It was ace.
When they checked the machine they asked me if I was in a lot of pain, I ust said "no I like the morphine" and we all had a laugh. Until they took it off me.
Then they gave me these awful morphine based tablets and they gave me a bad trip so I stopped taking them.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Saliva is a painkiller? How come I have toothache then?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
So, the behaviour observed in animals where they lick wounds, and even in humans, that 'kiss it better' (introduce saliva to the wound), or suck on a sore wound to make it feel better, by instinct, hasn't given the clue that there's something in saliva that helps?
There's a whole store of herb and animal lore that's been systematically quashed for decades (well, since the great witch hunts really), and science is only just getting round to looking at it now.
There's a lot to be said for 'complimentary' medicine for lesser ailments (although the modern pharmaceutical treatments are definitely magnitudes more effective for front line serious treatment). Rather than just decrying it, perhaps it should be investigated more thoroughly?
Sorry, it had to be said.
The rats? What about those poor bacteria in the saliva, just being sacrificed so the scientists could make the painkiller? There were probably more bacteria in there, eradicated, than there were humans that ever lived!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I am going to claim saliva addiction and start snogging every good looking girl I see for the rest of the afternoon.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I hate rats. I'll buy a product based on how many more rats they killed during testing then the nearest competitor.
Next up, little rat-like dogs. Can we require medical testing on those?
I'm completely against animal testing on cute little fuzzy bunnies and cool dogs, like golden retrievers. I'm against testing on some monkeys, but others you can go for it - like that little brown bastard that threw feces on me at the zoo. Give him monkey-AIDS.
Also, I never buy bug repellent that has been tested on mosquitoes. The slaughter must stop!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Easy to synthesize.
Made from saliva.
Well, the "War on Drugs" is about to get interesting. Have you had you mouth drained by a government-approved suction center yet today? "Today the police knocked over another spit house..."
(I know, I know, synthesize means they don't need actual saliva... just trying to be funny.)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I understand they might be comparing relative potency, but comparing to THREE GRAMS of morphine is kinda excessive.
300 mg morphine will render just about any human being unconscious and apnoeic pretty quickly.
3000 mg will knock you out cold, stop you breathing, and drop your blood pressure precipitously, more or less instantaneously.
In which sense, numerous things have have the same pain-killing effect as three grams of morphine.
Being hit by a freight train, for instance.
They isolated a peptide which inhibits two enzymes that chew up enkephalins, the body's natural pain killers. Inhibiting these makes the naturally-released enkephalins hang around longer. The problem is that peptide drugs have a checkered history. See the article linked below.
0 3v1
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/06058651
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
You know it's just wrong for a post that starts with "When we complain about how aliens probe our anuses" to be modded insightful.
However I think you will find that man's inhumanity to animals is usually pretty unimaginitive compared with mans inhumanity to man.
Generally you don't have people getting really emotional about hurting animals, not like the way they get all involved in hurting other people.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
i think its not so black and white. if you were about to die of cancer and some scientists said they could synthesise a cure by torturing a cage full of rabbits would you want them to? Even though its a horrible choice i cant see that i would choose to die.
on the other hand, testing something so trivial as make up on an animal doesnt have any ethical justification that i can discern. then there's the sliding scale in between.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
More than the idea of reducing the quantity required, the question is whether this substance can block pain without having addictive qualities. That's a very important question, I think, and one that it seems they don't have the info on yet, because I can't imagine them leaving it out if they knew.
BBC got it right: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6142842.stm
I have a friend who is a neuro-oncology researcher. A very large part of her job is: causing cancer in rats, killing those rats, and sectioning their brains. Horror may be in the eye of the beholder, but she does not practice cruelty. The rats are killed by being placed into a box with CO2 (from a dry-ice chamber). That's probably a more peaceful death than I can expect.
Granted, when you are researching pain meds, there's probably going to be pain involved. But that doesn't mean than the researchers get any pleasure out of causing this pain, or that they cause any more pain than necessary.
If you truly feel that a rat life is worth as much as a human life, or that an hour of rat pain is as bad as an hour of human pain, then it is hard to justify your continued existence. Even if you are as green as you can get, and a hard-core vegan, your ecological footprint is very large (certainly compared to a rat), and responsible for the deaths of many small animals. The fact that you use a computer means that your carbon footprint is not that of a primitive hunter-gatherer. If you eat vegetables and/or grains, you are responsible for the deaths of several small mammals (such as fieldmice) and thousands of insects every week, just from the mechanical harvesting process (even assuming that your food is 'organic' and thus pesticide-free.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Try inhaling some CO2 yourself, it's very painful. I don't oppose killing rats, but it would be better to suffocate them with pure nitrogen or something. Lack of oxygen is not painful.
They didn't inject 3g of morphine in a human.
They didn't even inject 3g of morphine in a rat.
What they found was that 3 grams of morphine per kg body weight is about as potent as 1 gram of morphine per kg body weight of the new saliva substance.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Or suffocate them with nitrous oxide. Let them go out laughing...
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
If you're going to kill through suffocation, there are few more cruel ways than using CO2.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
As for the small rat-like dogs, I'm afraid they're pretty much worthless even for cruel and inhumane experiments. However, you can still feed them to coyotes. Coyotes are cool dogs like golden retrievers and they eat small rat-like dogs! They go through poodles like I go through popcorn. Yay coyotes! Alligators are no good though. Sure they eat small rat-like dogs and the occasional resident from Florida but they're cold blooded and you know they're trying to bring back the dominance of the dinosaur. I suggest we genetically engineer crocodiles to have warm blood and fur. That'd show them!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I find it doubtful that you could have an effective painkiller that wasn't usable recreationally.
The human body's pain regulatory system is tightly bound up with a behaviour-rewarding system. Certain actions which are evolutionarily beneficial (to the species or the tribe, even if not to the individual) trigger a release of endorphins, the body's own homebrew morphine analogues which are also produced in response to pain. When an individual is not in pain, stimulation of the endorphin receptors produces a highly pleasurable sensation.
Opiates such as morphine or heroin are chemically similar enough to endorphins to bind to the same receptors. This makes them good painkillers. It also makes them good ways to induce pleasurable sensations for recreational purposes.
Beside any psychological effect (which may well be habit-forming in its own right), continued over-use of opiates can cause a reduction in the body's endorphin production. When the artificial painkillers wear off, the body is not ready with natural painkillers and so normal bodily functions produce heightened sensations -- the blood can be felt flowing through arteries, the ends of bones can be felt moving past one another, and so on. The exact manifestation of symptoms is a person-to-person variable. Most people find this state unbearable and so seek out more opiates rather than wait for the body's endorphin production to stabilise. This is physical dependence (the body cannot function normally without drugs). At £1 a breath, a heroin habit is not a cheap habit unless you are a rich rock star.
Some people have found that they can naturally produce endorphins in more than sufficient quantities to mask pain, and actually deliberately harm themselves to trigger an endorphin release. (Gripping ice cubes tightly in the hands is one of the least-dangerous ways to cause temporary pain sensations and so trigger endorphin production, and is recommended by some agencies for persistent self-harm practitioners). Others have found that by deliberately performing (what they perceive to be) altruistic acts (such as helping an old lady across the road, whether or not she actually wants to cross the road), they can stimulate endorphin production.
Unless the pain-relieving and pleasure-inducing properties of endorphins are separable, any painkiller that attempts to mimic their action will be both usable recreationally and doubly habit-forming.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I can't get the picture out of my mind of a rat being tortured with make up. I picture researchers putting some gastly shade of eye makeup on a female rat and watching to see if she can get a date with a male rat.
I suspect alcohol is involved, which would explain the current ghastly shades of eye makeup available for human women. Don't the researchers realize that after a few cold ones, the male rats could care less about the eye makeup?
Inconvenient? Like polio or pertussis or plague?
Having worked in both the biotechnology and computer programming fields, I can tell you that there is not going to be a computer simulation that is good enough to obviate the need for all animal testing anytime soon. Biological systems are way too complex to accurately model. Also, there are almost always unexpected synergistic effects with new drugs. Of course, it is ridiculous to test a new hairspray on a rabbits eyes - we pretty much know what's going to happen there.
Most people who work in biotechnology are not the sadistic torturers you might think. One time in the lab I worked in, an animal tech didn't check all the mouse cages before a rack of cages went through the autoclave. There was a mouse left in one of the cages. The mouse most likely died a horrible and painful death. The tech was devestated about the mouse, and resigned even before she could be fired (which was the lab's policy if anyone was shown to have committed any animal cruelty).
Most reputable laboratories go to great lengths to ensure the comfort of the animals being tested. But the hard fact is that it is more ethical to test new drugs and procedures on animals than it is on humans.
Another thing that nobody on the Animal Rights side of the issue seems to mention is that a lot of this kind of testing furthers veterinary science. I have a 14-year-old dog that we rescued from a shelter when she was a pup. She is currently sporting two TPLO operations: one on each knee and is taking an antiinflammetory drug for arthritis. Both this surgery and the drug were experimental at one time, but thanks to science my dog is living out her final days in relative comfort rather than having to be put to sleep several years ago.
Aside: I'm not against animal research, but as a former animal researcher who euthanized rodents I have to say that this is a rotten way to kill animals. CO2 euthanasia is not quick, the animals are clearly in distress (they die gasping for air, clawing at the container edges, rolling in their urine and feces). I can only imagine that CO2 has become popular because it sounds nice--you know, you put the animals to sleep with some gas that they breath all the time anyway.
Better by far is cervical dislocation--a quick snap of the neck and the animal falls senseless. Unfortunately, that practice is increasingly viewed as barbaric and is discouraged in many places. It's a strange world we live in where we care less about the actual suffering of the animal than how humane we appear to be.
Ouch, I hadn't thought that through.
It still might be worth it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
...but let me assure you that mother nature doesn't.
Can you imagine the pain of being eaten by a large predator? Remember that man's evolutionary ancestors were not always at the top of the food chain; predation has certainly touched you.
Also, the venoms of poisonous animals have evolved to increase pain, allowing the predator to more effectively incapacitate the victim.
Just because mankind removes itself from the sadistic slaughter of the world does not mean that the slaughter itself abates. No matter how violent and predatory we may imagine ourselves to be, we are amateurs compared to what nature has produced.