My laboratory at Mayo Clinic (1976 to 1988) and at the University of California San Diego (1989-present) has been continuously involved in NIH-supported research on the mechanisms of pain and analgesia. Our work provided the first description of the specific analgesic actions of spinally-delivered drugs such as opiates and alpha 2 agonists and the complexity of spinal agents in specifically altering pain processing (>150 papers). My group has been very active with >850 papers, >46,000 citation in >20,000 papers.