TWO OF MY FAVORITE PEOPLE
NIH Director
Francis Collins has newly blogged about a very interesting and important
biochemical development; a means to combat chronic pain.
I can
imagine nothing much worse than living with chronic pain. Hell, there are nights – not many of them,
thankfully – when a tiny little ache somewhere in my aging body will require me
to choose between several undesirable courses of action: either gulp down more pain pills than are
good for me, or gut it out, lose sleep, and feel like crap the next day. Admittedly,
I’m no hero, but I can’t imagine surviving with serious pain that never lets
up. Some cancer patients on chemo
experience just that. I hope this
discovery helps.
It appears
that a scientist at UC San Diego, assisted by 13 graduate students and post
docs - no wonder these guys are so
productive! – has found a way to deactivate a gene that plays a major role in the
“pain” experience. He got the idea from
studying the genomes of those rare persons born with a total inability to
hurt. (Did you know such folks
existed? I certainly didn’t.) The tool involved is our old friend CRISPR
Cas9, with the gene-snipping enzyme deactivated. A significant advantage of this new wrinkle
is that it can be reversed. Here, read Dr.
Collin’s usual lucid prose:
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