The next Nobel Prize winner would eliminate pain.

Have you ever been in such pain that you couldn't imagine enduring any more?

If so, you've probably been (1) a cancer patient in the last stages, (2) a torture victim, (3) an expectant mother, (4) a sufferer of chronic back pain or of some nervous disorder/disease. Of course there are other examples, but these are among the most common.

The question I'm sure they would all ask is this: What is this pain for? Why am I enduring it?

Pain is supposed to be, so far as I can tell, nature's way of telling us that we need to stop doing something. It hurts too much! But if the pain is inflicted by others (torture) or by our own bodies (cancer, childbirth, back pain, etc.), there is no way we can stop it -- so what's its purpose?

I'm one of those people who thinks that nature -- meaning all of us and all the other phenomena we experience, from scenery to the stars to the woods and on and on -- has some kind of plan. I don't say a god designed it, but something did. Why do I say that? Because it works, and it works whether we're here or not. It worked before we were here, we humans, and it will work long after we're gone. If we disappeared from the planet tomorrow, some kind of life would go on.

But pain only started when nervous systems first developed in living beings. I mean, glaciers feel no pain. Neither do mountains, rising up from some underwater disturbance. We also think trees and all the plants in the world feel no pain. Does a carrot flinch when you yank it up for the earth? Not likely. The same for onions, leeks, potatoes, et al.

So what was the first species to feel pain? Not being a scientist, I don't know. I suspect that the tiniest of us, amoebas or whatever, probably don't feel pain. But do earthworms when they're dragged out of the earth and pierced with a fishing hook that we thread all the way through their bodies (to keep them properly hooked)? I don't know. Do you? From my experience, they do seem to jerk around and maybe wish it wasn't happening to them.

I once witnessed life and death on a small scale in my backyard, when some kind of bug went after another one, actually darting out and spearing it so that liquid from the other's body started spewing. I mean these were tiny creatures -- the size of a pain pill -- but something brutal happened, and the second creature, this little bug, went still, couldn't move, while the first one, about the same size but obviously the predator, sat back on a leaf and waited for the other one to die (and be consumed, I assume). I have to admit that I didn't stay to see the final scene:
I had a lawn to mow -- and probably mowed up both of them in the process. But did the bug that was attacked feel pain? Do flies trapped in a spider's web and injected with venom that paralyzes them feel pain? How about gazelles run down by lions and killed? At what level does pain kick in?
Usually we can say it's mammals that share our animal instincts and fears and maybe pain. But wouldn't you think a frog or a turtle eaten by a crocodile would feel some pain? How about a small fish eaten by a larger one? A shark may chomp and swallow someone whole, but what about piranhas that attack bigger fish, and even animals wading in the shallow waters, taking litle bites, but in a swarm, until the large prey just collapses? Wouldn't that hurt? There was a torture in the old, old days called something like "death from a thousand cuts," in which small strips of flesh were sliced from the unfortunate condemned person, one by one, until he/she died, probably of shock to his/her system. But think of the pain! Ouch! That's what piranhas do. Unlike humans, though, they're not trying to torture: it's the way they eat. But still . . .

For sure we can say that our pets experience pain: we've all seen a cat or dog whimpering or mewling from a bite or a thorn in the paw or some other problem. Hey, vets make a living from our pets' pain.

What we can say for sure is that humans feel pain. And since we're all humans, let's start there. And where we need to start is at the point where pain serves a purpose and where it just hurts and needs to go away.

If I burn myself by touching a hot stove, I learn not to do that again. If I have a pain in my side, I may need to get that diagnosed and treated. Pain serves a useful purpose for us humans, an alert sytem. My throat hurts every time I cough. Get it looked at. That sore on my foot just gets worse and worse and won't heal and hurts all the time. Get it looked at. The body is saying to you that something is out of whack.

But it's pretty obvious, as I said earlier, that there are times when pain serves no purpose at all.
Take for instance the last stages of cancer. The patient is going to die. Why suffer further? Or giving birth. The expectant mother is going to expel that beloved child from her body. Why does she have to suffer? (And forget all that curse of Eve nonsense.) Or, maybe the most troubling case of all: the torture victim. The only function pain is going to serve in that instance is to make the sufferer reveal the names of trusted allies or give up secrets. Our nerve endings are so constructed that, under duress, they can make us absolutely crazy and provoke behaviors that, in our right minds, lounging by the pool with a nice drink, we would think unthinkable. Turn over our friends, our family, to despots? No way, we think, until the electrodes are in place.

So why hasn't someone done something about the problem of pain? Physical, nerve-related pain that can turn the smartest and most accomplished of us into spies and traitors and outright cowards? Into weeping shadows of ourselves, ashamed to have our loved ones see us as we beg to die and put out of our misery? Why do I even have to bring this up?

In short, why hasn't someone come up with a way for us normal humans who may find ourselves in extraordinary circumstances to shut off the pain response in our bodies? Why isn't there a switch that we could hit or turn that would block the nerve impulses that make possible torture and the intolerable suffering that many of us in the end-stages of our lives have to go through?

Yes, there are drugs that will do it. But we don't all have access to them when we need them. I saw more than one young man dying in Viet Nam who was ushered into death by morphine, and it was truly miraculous: their faces went slack, their voices calmed, and they muttered their last words in a world of no pain. But can we all count on having morphine when we need it?

Why can't we -- why haven't we -- come up with a way to turn off the pain trigger?

There must be a place in the brain -- maybe more than one -- that controls the realization, the sensation of pain. (Obviously so, or how else would paralysis victims feel no pain in those limbs?)
So why hasn't someone tried to pinpoint it and teach us how to control it? Maybe mind control, but more likely some kind of implant that we could turn on or off as needed.

Take this for an example: You live in a country that is controlled by the military, and they arrest you on whatever bogus charge and haul you in and sit you in a chair and threaten to pull out your fingernails if you won't tell them the names of your friends. In normal circumstances, you would be terrified, and once they'd pulled out your left thumbnail with pliers, slowly, you might be willing to name all your friends and their friends, too, not to mention everyone in your family. But suppose you didn't feel the pain. Suppose they pulled that thumbnail out, and you saw that you were losing it -- bye bye -- but you didn't feel the excruciating pain of it. You might decide that the cause you're a part of is so important that you can lose all those nails -- and maybe a finger or two -- before you give up the information they want.

In other words, what if the torturer lost his most important weapon -- your pain?

Think about it.

And what if, on a simpler/lower level, that back pain you've known for so long that has kept you from doing what you wanted to do but that's just a result of a pinched nerve, disappeared? What if, by hitting this chemical/neurological switch, you shut off the pain? After all, there really wasn't anything wrong with you in the first place; it was just your nerves malfunctioning. Your back is perfectly fine otherwise.

Pain is important to alert us to dangers: cut yourself with a knife, get bitten by a rattlesnake, break your arm while skate-boarding, and you know you need to take some action -- and also avoid doing those things that brought on the pain in the first place. But pain in our lives, for us humans, has gone overboard: it attacks us when there's really nothing we can do to relieve it and when we're way past its intended danger signal.

So why not just get rid of it? Not in all cases, but in some. Maybe what I'm talking about is a sci-fi novel in which, in some future time, we've found the pain trigger in our brains and figured out how to disable it when necessary. Have it working most of the time but, when it's not needed, or when it's going to cause us unnecessary misery, shut it down. The torturer appears with his hideous and terrifying instruments and nasty smile? Shut it down. The doctor says we have two weeks to live, and they're not going to be fun? Shut it down. The back acts up, but we know we're in good shape? Shut it down. The baby is due, maybe overdue, and the pain is getting to our breaking point? Shut it the f*ck down!

Pain is a friend but a deadly enemy, too. Can't we control it? Wouldn't that be worth a Nobel Prize? When my own bad back starts acting up, I'd be willing to chip in few bucks.