Marcin Kowrygo, $50,000, for the Far Out Initiative. Recently a woman in Scotland was found to be incapable of experiencing any physical or psychological suffering*. Scientists sequenced her genome and found a rare mutation affecting the FAAH-OUT pseudogene, which regulates levels of pain-related neurotransmitters. Marcin and his team are working on pharmacologic and genetic interventions that can imitate her condition. If they succeed, they hope to promote them as painkillers, splice them into farm animals to produce cruelty-free meat, or just give them to everyone all the time and end all suffering in the world forever. They are extremely serious about this.
*There’s a long history of studying patients with various pain insensitivity syndromes. Many of them die after getting injuries that they don’t catch in time; for example, they might accidentally brush against a candle, light themselves on fire, and not notice until they look down and see the flames. Ms. Cameron is especially interesting because she’s in her seventies, very healthy, and by all accounts has lived a pretty normal life (she does report that she “often burns her arms on the oven”, but seems to catch it faster than people with other variants of her condition). I’ve seen some suggestion that she has something like pain asymbolia, where she still perceives pain but doesn’t find it unpleasant. Maybe she burns her arms because low levels of asymbolic pain aren’t attention-grabbing enough to immediately catch her attention if she’s distracted - but she manages to stay overall alive and healthy because higher levels of pain can grab her attention even without associated unpleasant qualia. This is the sort of thing Marcin’s team will be considering as they try to understand her condition better.
