Abstract
Serious scientific efforts aimed at understanding how general anesthetics produce their powerful effects began soon after the historic demonstration of ether anesthesia on October 16, 1846 in Boston, Massachusetts. Progress was slow for most of the intervening 166 years, but has dramatically advanced during the last three decades, aided by new ideas and the revolutionary techniques of molecular biology. One result of this progress is the report by Zhou et al1 in this month's Anesthesiology, describing studies on ketamine in conditional knockout animals. Here, I briefly sketch how genetic techniques have spurred our understanding of general anesthetic mechanisms.
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