Supplement

Has a more thorough understanding of pain biology presaged an avalanche of new treatment modalities?

) was headed toward extinction.

Non-human animals have served as valuable models in many types of biomedical investigations, but when it comes to pain, some assumptions are necessary.

Bert Myers/Photo Researchers Inc.This past December, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Prialt, Elan Corporation's synthetic version of a peptide from the venomous sea snail Conus magus. The drug, ziconotide, is the first of its kind and appears to alleviate severe pain by blocking N-type Ca+ channels.Ziconotide is designed from one of about 100 pharmacologically active compounds in C. magus. And this undersea combinatorial chemist is only one of approximately 500 Conus species. Resear

Pain research has been enriched by remarkable discoveries during the past three decades leading to an unprecedented understanding of underlying mechanisms.

Pamela Flood says she's very excited about nicotine.

Culture shapes human pain. Lesions, neurons, neu rotransmitters, and genes may provide a starting point for an exploration of pain's roots in animal models, but among humans, it is our culture as well as our biology that invariably shapes pain.

People have used marijuana and its derivatives to relieve pain as well as get high for thousands of years.

One Tuesday morning in March 1990, 19-year-old Shannon Leidig, a freshman music therapy major at Virginia's Shenandoah College and Conservatory of Music, woke up with a burning, throbbing pain in her right hand.

In the 1960s, researchers found that tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) alleviated neuropathic pain, such as postherpetic neuralgia.

Descartes gave a colorful description of the mechanism of pain in the 17th Century: "Particles" of fire set in motion a spot on the skin of the foot, and by means of a "delicate thread" they open a "pore" at the other end, much like ringing a bell with a rope.

Researchers are approaching a new level of understanding for the neuropathic pain-relief mechanisms of gabapentin.

Pain is indelibly interwoven into the fabric of human experience.

Ever since the United States government passed laws governing the prescription of opioid drugs early in the 20th century, doctors and regulators have been engaged in a balancing act, trying to use the drugs to treat pain appropriately while preventing their abuse.

Pain is one of the more complex perceptions.

Pain is simultaneously a consuming, blinding reality and a complex and slippery object of study.

Michael Caterina recalls a graduate student in David Julius' University of California, San Francisco lab who often brought his collection of bottled hot sauces to lab parties, for tasting with guacamole and chips.

When Merck pulled its blockbuster painkiller, Vioxx, from the market on Celebrex and Bextra, Prexige, which is manufactured by Novartis, and Sept. 30, 2004, after a large clinical trial provided evidence that the drug increased the risk of heart attack and stroke, the move cast doubts on the safety of similar Cox-2-specific inhibitors, including Pfizer's another Merck drug, Arcoxia.

If you visit the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, you'll find crash barriers disguised as large flowerpots surrounding its medical school and hospital.

New York City is home to some of the world's top scientists; Here's a sampling.