A Molecular Theory of General Anesthesia: Anesthesia is attributed to the formation in the brain of minute hydrate crystals of the clathrate type

Abstract

During the last twenty years much progress has been made in the determination of the molecular structure of living organisms and the understanding of biological phenomena in terms of the structure of molecules and their interaction with one another. The progress that has been made. in the field of molecular biology during this period has related in the main to somatic and genetic aspects of physiology, rather than to psychic. We may now have reached the time when a successful molecular attack on psychobiology, including the nature of encephalonic mechanisms, consciousness, memory, narcosis, sedation, and similar phenomena, can be initiated. As one of the steps in this attack I have formulated a rather detailed theory of general anesthesia, which is described in the following paragraphs (1).