THE GOAL of the Pain Lab is not to separate the men from the boys, of course. Nor is it to generate endless laughs at the names of the founder, Dr. Angst, and one of the first assistants he hired after creating the lab 12 years ago, Nurse Tingle. This is research, people!

Dr. Angst, 47, originally came to Stanford in 1994 as a visiting research fellow from University Hospital of Berne, in Switzerland, to study pharmacology. At the time, reliable tests hadn't yet been devised to measure the effectiveness of pain meds, his original focus. So he started the lab with the goal of generating precise findings about the nature of hurt. What makes it one of the world's premier research facilities is that the primary team of Angst, Rohlen, and Tingle, along with their half-dozen collaborators, have the ethical leeway to conduct red-hot, bleeding-edge "adrenergic receptor studies"—basically cooking, freezing, poking, shocking, and sunburning legions of volunteers in tests too difficult or expensive to conduct as full-blown clinical trials. (They do not, however, have the leeway to study, say, what went through Aron Ralston's mind when he sawed through his arm with the dull blade of a Leatherman knockoff. "That's out of my field," says Dr. Angst. "Ethically, I can't take a sledgehammer to your foot." Which is nice.)

Since its creation, the Pain Lab has provided strong evidence for some surprising theories. For example: Taking painkillers like Vicodin for more than a month makes a person more sensitive to pain (as if recovering from ACL surgery wasn't difficult enough), and people suffering from depression experience more pain (no wonder poets don't compete in the X Games). Currently, the Pain Labbers are trying to identify proteins in the body associated with pain, and they're also examining how low-voltage "transcranial electrical stimulation" (read "juice to the noodle") affects cognitive performance and postoperative recovery. (That's anesthesiologist Vladimir Nekhendzy's domain.) The most expansive of these is the test I'm mock-participating in, a study of 180 pairs of twins that's exploring whether pain sensitivity is determined by the genome. If this proves the case, curing hypersensitivity and chronic pain could be as simple as deleting a gene. But the results are still four to six years off. In the meantime, we're left to sort out on our own the likelihood that we were born soft.

I figured that, after a few days in Dr. Feelbad's lab, I might come home with data showing I work through pain like a Mack truck through toilet paper. But there was always another unsettling possibility: I'd inherited the wimp gene.