Keeping breathing steady and safe

Opiates, including morphine and fentanyl, are powerful painkillers and anesthetics, but they also can slow a person’s breathing to a dangerous rate. Scientists studying the kernel of brain cells that controls a body’s breathing rhythm may have discovered a way to prevent this sometimes-fatal side effect.

Over the past decade, biologists have pinpointed a region in the brain stem called the pre-Bötzinger complex and learned that it generates the electrical impulses that drive breathing (SN: 1/4/03, p.