A Killer for All Pains

His brand new painkiller, says France's Dr. Henri Laborit, dampens the aches and pains of arthritis, burns, cancer, childbirth, neuralgia, rheumatism--just about all the ills the flesh is heir to. Such fantastic claims may sound like the spiel of a turn-of-the-century snake-oil peddler, but the medical community has learned to take Dr. Laborit at his word. When he reports on the properties of the compound which he calls Ag 246, he speaks with the authority of a researcher who has already been credited with important drug discoveries.

It was Laborit who ferreted out the unsuspected nerve-center-depressant properties of chlorpromazine, the wonder drug of 1954, which opened up the new field of psychopharmacology (the use of drugs to influence the emotions). It was Laborit who found the formula for the sleep inducer gamma-OH, which has no unpleasant aftereffects.

Awake but Painless. With no degree but his M.D. from Bordeaux University, he belongs to neither the French Academy of Medicine or of Science; he has no university affiliation. "If I were on a faculty," he says, "I wouldn't have made any discoveries, because I would have spent all my time taking tests for higher academic rank."

With no government or university support, Laborit works, with eleven assistants, in the same crowded four-room lab he built eight years ago, and maintains with income from his discoveries.

The greatest income yet may come from Ag 246, which was concocted--with the help of Chemist Camille Wermuth and longtime aide Dr. Bernard Weber--as an improvement on a Laborit arthritis drug. By molecular manipulation, Laborit and his colleagues created 40 variants of the arthritis medicine, then started systematically to test each one. On only the second try, they found what they were looking for. They called it Ag 246; it is also known as MEMPP, short for chlorhydrate of morpholino-ethyl-2 methy14 pheny16 pyridazone-3.

After 21 years of cautious testing Laborit reports that the intravenously administered drug enhances the effect of anesthetics, thus lowering the amount necessary for a patient, and thereby lowering the danger. It reduces inflammation, has an anticonvulsive effect useful in treatment of epilepsy, and has a suppressing effect on symptoms of Parkinson's disease. "But it is Ag 246's analgesic or pain-killing qualities that are perhaps most promising," says Laborit. Operations have already been carried out using the new drug with no anesthetic. The patients felt no pain but remained awake throughout the operation, carrying on rational communication with the doctor.

"All Should Vanish." Ag 246 has also been used on victims of constant pain who previously got complete relief only with unconsciousness. A cancer patient, with pain so grave that a lobotomy had been contemplated, got so much relief from the drug that he was able to read and eat normally.

Such stunning successes are possible, explains Laborit, because of its ability "to depress all that which has to do with affectivity, with passions, rage--the reactions of the more primitive part of the brain--yet leave the advanced centers functioning." American and French companies are already planning to market his patented discovery within two years, after the continuing search for further uses or undesirable side effects has been completed. But even now, says the confident Laborit, "it would seem that one could say without being too optimistic, that pain in all its forms will be called upon to disappear while the patient maintains perfectly lucid consciousness. The pains of childbirth, the pains of dentistry, the pains of cancer--all should vanish from human life."

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