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OF GREEN MONKEYS and, CHRONIC PAIN - Page 4

© Juan C. Mendible

You see my point? With a no-result, they talked about cures and vaccines for several human diseases and germ line manipulation.

In another case a year ago, a so-called smart mice strain was created at Princeton University in New Jersey. The mice were also produced through gene manipulation and appeared to learn faster and remember better. This report made big news and resulted in speculation about the intelligence gene and how this procedure could be used to produce smarter humans.

Now, scientists from the Washington University School of Medicine at St. Louis, have reported that those mice may be more sensitive to chronic pain.

J. Tsien the leader of the team that created the smart mice and M. Zhuo, the head of the team claiming that the smart mice are more sensitive to pain, do not agree. The mice creators say that it is not increased pain sensitivity but that the animals just remember injuries for longer. Zhuo, however, says that if they respond to pain more, they will avoid it faster and so they will appear smarter.

How do they now about pain? Well, they teach them to avoid an electric shock. How do they know about chronic pain? The researchers injected formalin into the animals' paws and watched how often they licked the wound. After the first hour, the smart mice did so more often.

Well, you must know that the smart mice have two copies of one particular gene; and it may very well be possible that both investigators are right. That is, if you duplicate the gene you enhance the memory and at the same time increase the sensitivity to chronic pain.

Until a few months ago, people believed that the human genome consisted of 100,000 to 150,000 genes. Now, because of the Human Genome Project that figure is down to possibly less than 40,000. Thus, if this number is right it is possible that an unknown number of genes have more than one function and the duplicated gene we are talking about is one of them.

This is a very interesting possibility, because Zhuo thinks that the gene could be a potential target for pain-relieving drugs. Tsien, however, believes that drugs targeting it could be developed to enhance memory in people whose ability to remember is deteriorating with age. In his words: "We would be restoring juvenile brain features."

The big question is, could you affect one function without affecting the other?

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