You have to love scientists. Diligently they toil away at their abstruse projects, oblivious to such important issues as war and peace and terrorism and who's going to win the Kyushu Basho. We pay them next to nothing, ignore their pointy-headed little reports and cheer them on only when they score the occasional Nobel Prize for work that nobody understands, thus making the whole country look more intelligent. But once in a while they come up with a winner, something we can not only grasp right away but can even imagine putting to good use in our own lives.

Such was the finding by a group of German researchers, presented last week at a Florida neuroscience conference, that people who suffer chronic pain actually feel worse -- and complain more, too -- when their spouses comfort them than they do when they're ignored. Distract or neglect the sufferer, and he (or maybe even she) will literally feel less pain. Mollycoddle him, and he'll writhe all the more. "I am fascinated by this," responded one California scientist, described in news reports as an expert in "the neurobiology of pain."

Well, we should think so. It doesn't take a pain neurobiologist to see that this announcement is fascinating on a number of levels.