Thursday, May 17, 2007

Thank God.

In a Discover Magazine article:

Pain. Natural redheads have a higher pain threshold than others, says geneticist Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University’s pain laboratory. Men and women with naturally red hair can withstand 25 percent more electric shock than non-redheads. And painkillers used in childbirth work three times better on red-haired women than on others. Mogil and his team found that the mutant gene that causes red hair, melanocortin-1 (MC1R), also affects how redheads (including mice) react to pain. Now geneticist Ian Jackson of the United Kingdom Medical Research Council plans to study redheads in the hope of developing new painkillers.

Altho, I wonder about the testing of electric shock threshold....

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