Dr. Eliza Middleton

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104 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 24 Jun

Dr. Eliza Middleton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Science Show · Insects and pain and The Selfish Gene turns 50 · 19 Jun 2026 podcast
There's a paper from a group, Zabala and Gomez, and they were looking at whether crickets show any sort of pain-like responses to morphine.
Much like we are able to withstand more pain when we get treated with morphine, they develop tolerance to it, so they need progressively more morphine to deal with the pain.
When they're treated with naloxone, which is a chemical that's used to block opioids in humans, it showed the same impact in the crickets, that the morphine was no longer effective when they were treated with naloxone.
And it also showed that they get addicted to morphine, much like humans get addicted to morphine.
But then... In 2003, which is still a long time ago, researchers at Caltech identified a gene in fruit flies that they named painless because it was essential for thermal nocioception.
So flies lacking that gene failed to respond to damaging heat.
So they were able to, you know, turn that on and off and there we have some evidence of nocioception.
So that evidence in invertebrates and insects has been around for, you know, quite a while, I'd say.
But...
The conceptual leap between nociception and experiencing pain, I think, really started to gain momentum in 2019 with Greg Neely's work at UCEDD with his team.
And that was where they showed that the fruit flies can develop chronic pain.
So that's not a reflex.
Reflexes don't generalise across the body.
Reflexes don't persist over weeks.
That requires some central nervous system involvement.
Bumblebees can make motivational trade-offs around pain.
So they're willing to endure a noxious heat for a sufficiently valuable food reward.
And that willingness scales with the reward's value.
So reflexes also don't make trade-offs.
Trade-offs require the brain to evaluate those competing priorities.
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