Dr. Feelgood.

Sir John Vane knows a lot about pain. The British pharmacologist won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1982 for discovering the link between aspirin and pain signals in the brain. Now he says scientists can do a better job at pinpointing and relieving pain. The prognosis: Researchers are busily developing a new generation of drugs for everything from minor pangs to postsurgical trauma, without the side effects that have dogged some of the more recent entrants in the pain relief market.But a recent string of woes have put a hurt on the pain relief business. The physiology of pain relief is still only partly understood, even though aspirin has been around since 1899 and Johnson & Johnson's McNeil Laboratories started selling Tylenol in 1955. Vane's research led drug companies to target pain by stopping the COX enzyme from producing prostaglandins.