RE: Presenting a whole new organ in skin to sense pain - journal club.
Once again, I started a comment and lost it. Maybe it's floating around somewhere in the virtual universe and will pop up again in its unfinished state. (I hope not)
A very accessible article... no jargon, not hard to understand at all. Schwann cells--I'd heard of them before but didn't know anything about them. Now I do !! The continuing education on SteemSTEM :)
I won't try to answer your question...that'll give me a headache, but I think it's great that we know more about pain receptors and pain transmission. So much about pain is not understood. We used to deal with it in the past (when a cause couldn't be found) by attributing it to hysteria. Now we deal with it by masking it--opiods. Look where that got us. Wouldn't it be wonderful to actually understand the mechanism and address that? Schwann cells seem to offer a good clue.
However, I do have to mention how distressing I found the description of the pain inflicted on the mice. There is no way to humanely inflict pain. These are cruel experiments, and, as you say:
would have been nice to see how relevant this is to humans
We don't even know if this is useful! I'm going to refer you to an article in The Scientist that suggests a humane alternative to suffering:
https://www.the-scientist.com/critic-at-large/opinion--ai-beats-animal-testing-at-finding-toxic-chemicals-65795
Maybe it's time we reexamined the experiment model. Just an idea, a bit of a tangent from the subject of your post. And this is a great post.
Thank you, as always, for advancing my understanding of science!
You know the other day I went to take some mice pups for the experiment. As I took them the mother just stared at me in confusion. I kept them back and thought I would do it some other day. On one hand, it is so difficult to not feel their pain. But on other hand, they are so important for human health. Is it right, is it wrong? I try not to think about it. The only thing we can do as biologists is to minimize their use and try to be as humane as possible.
When I was in my undergrad I wanted to build an AI program that could mimic all the processes in biology. From what happens in a single cell to what happens in an animal. However, at that point, my knowledge of biology was not so clear, neither the technology was so advanced as it is now. However, it's been like 10 years since that thought first came to my mind. And I think we are at a point in time where we can attempt something like that. It's still not going to be a cakewalk, but it is worth a shot. Maybe, I will someday take out some time to write about it and we can proceed in making such a system. Or maybe if life offers I can get a postdoc in some biomimetics lab or something. Fingers crossed!
Also thanks for this lovely comment and feedback. I always look forward to your comments. :) they always make my day.
It makes me sad when I hear about the pups. Thank you for appreciating the value of their lives. Respect for life--it does start with the little things, doesn't it? I hope you follow through on that research to find alternatives to animal experimentation. What a noble thing that would be. Wish I could help :)
Thanks for being so gracious in entertaining my concerns. You never disappoint.