Pain

The UK’s Physiological Society has named Gary Lewin an Honorary Fellow. Two Nobel Prize laureates in Physiology or Medicine also received the distinction. It is the highest honor that the tradition-rich society presents to an individual.

Mixing and mingling on Hydra: For the anniversary of the Lewin Lab, leading somatic sensation experts, colleagues and students of Gary Lewin all came to a Greek island. In this interview, he talks with his former mentee Stefan Lechner about the symposium, dazzling personalities and what makes a good PI.

For his outstanding doctoral thesis on sexual communication in fruit flies, the Max Planck Society awards an Otto Hahn Medal to neuroscientist Mohammed Khallaf Ali. At the MDC, he works in the Lewin lab and is dedicated to the sensation of touch and pain in animals.

Gary Lewin conducts research at MDC on signaling in human bodies. He looks at how the sense of touch and pain function, especially in the naked mole rat. It can survive for a very long time without oxygen, is largely insensitive to pain, and lives remarkably long. In the Resonator podcast, Lewin talks about these animals and his research.

We have known about a skin touch sensor for more than 160 years. MDC scientists now publish in Nature Neuroscience some of the first proof of its involvement in detecting tiny vibrations that help us to distinguish between a rough or a smooth surface.

If mice live in pathogen-free housing conditions, they are not further burdened by immunodeficiency. This has been reported by researchers at the MDC, Freie Universität Berlin and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in PLOS ONE. For the first time, the researchers comprehensively investigated the well-being of these animals.

James L. Kirkland is not working to eliminate aging altogether, but rather seeks to alleviate or end age-related diseases. The director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, gave a virtual lecture on September 21 at the MDC.

Six animal welfare officers ensure that the MDC observes all the rules when conducting animal experiments for medical research. Nadja Daberkow-Nitsche, head of the MDC animal house and her colleagues also help MDC researchers to submit animal experimentation applications to the relevant authorities.

A new approach to chronic pain treatment targets a molecule that moves pain messages into nerve cell nuclei. For this study recently published in Science, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science worked together with MDC scientists.

Opioids are both a curse and a blessing. They can relieve people of pain, but they often come with severe side effects – including dependency. Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center have now investigated the signaling pathways that produce both the desired effects and undesired side effects in the brain.