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Neurobiologist John Wood has long been interested in how animals feel pain. His research at University College London (UCL) typically involved knocking out various ion channels important in sensory neuronal function from mouse models and observing the effects. But in the mid-2000s, a peculiar story about a boy in Pakistan opened up a new, and particularly human-centric, research path.
The story was relayed by Geoff Woods, a University of Cambridge geneticist. “Geoff had been wandering round Pakistan looking for consanguineous families that had genes contributing to microcephaly,” Wood recalls. During his time there, “somebody came to see him and said that there was a child in the marketplace who was damaging himself for the tourists—and was apparently pain-free.” The boy would regularly stick knives through ...
