For many people, the knife isn't the scary part of surgery. To be sure, general anesthesia renders patients pain-free, but it also leaves them unconscious, immobile and unable to remember what has happened.
Scientists do, however, have some ideas.
And at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists last week, one group led by Issaku Ueda described laboratory experiments with fireflies and goldfish that support one leading theory about general anesthesia's molecular actions. And if this explanation holds true, it could lead to anesthetics with fewer side effects and better drugs for bringing patients back up out of anesthesia-induced sleep. In particular, they set out to test the implication that under anesthesia, individual protein molecules in the brain somehow become larger than normal and that shrinking them rouses a person awake again. Using calorimetry and spectroscopy, they calculated how the luciferase enzyme responded physically to anesthetics and found that it was extraordinarily sensitive. The anesthetics relaxed the molecules, making them expand in size.