MEN’S saliva has yielded a painkiller three to six times as powerful as morphine. The team that isolated the substance, dubbed opiorphin, hope that it may spawn a new generation of painkillers without the negative addictive and psychological effects of morphine.
When Catherine Rougeot at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and her colleagues injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight gave the same pain relief as 3 grams of morphine. More dramatically still, rats needed six times as much morphine as opiorphin to become oblivious to the pain of other painful…
