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The Unfolding Story of How General Anesthetics Act

  • Chapter
The Wondrous Story of Anesthesia

Abstract

Soon after Morton’s 1846 demonstration of ether anesthesia, von Bibra and Harless proposed that ether acted by extracting brain lipids. This was followed by the influential theory of Meyer and Overton who proposed that anesthetics acted by directly perturbing membrane lipids. During the 1970s, evidence accumulated suggesting that this theory was wrong and the idea that anesthetics acted by directly binding to proteins began to take hold. This is now the accepted view and subsequent work focused on which proteins were important. There is now a consensus as to which proteins are important for intravenous anesthetics, but uncertainty still exists for the inhaled agents, although the anatomical target for these anesthetics in producing surgical immobility has been shown to be the spinal cord, rather than the brain.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Readers looking for scholarly accounts of anesthetic mechanisms should read the reviews I have cited in the text. What they will find here is a personal account of how the field has changed during the past 35 years from my own, inevitably biased, perspective.

  2. 2.

    This reviewer was not the only person who was unimpressed by our review. We received a letter from Linus Pauling telling us that, in fact, he had solved the problem of how anesthetic acted many years previously (see above).

  3. 3.

    Lieb was a native of Chicago and had a novel, an effective, way of avoiding jet-lag. He simply stayed on Chicago time all his life. He therefore arrived in the lab at around 2 in the afternoon and we would work together until the evening. He would then continue until the early hours when he would write me a letter telling me what he had been up to. This modus operandi persisted for the 30 years that we worked together.

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Acknowledgement

Although this chapter only bears my name, I want to acknowledge the many contributions and suggestions made by the Editors (particularly Ted Eger).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biophysics Section, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, South Kensington, SW7 2AZ, London, UK

    Prof. Nicholas P. Franks FRCA, FMedSci

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  1. Prof. Nicholas P. Franks FRCA, FMedSci
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Correspondence to Nicholas P. Franks FRCA, FMedSci .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Edmond I Eger II MD Emeritus Professor

  2. Departments of Anesthesia, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Lawrence J. Saidman MD Emeritus Professor

  3. Geoffrey Kaye Museum of Anaesthetic History, Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Rod N. Westhorpe OAM, MB, BS FRCA, FANZCA Former Honorary Curator

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© 2014 Edmond I Eger, MD

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Franks, N. (2014). The Unfolding Story of How General Anesthetics Act. In: Eger II, E., Saidman, L., Westhorpe, R. (eds) The Wondrous Story of Anesthesia. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8441-7_45

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