When the lights go out

• Autores: Philip Ball
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3115, 2017, págs. 36-39
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Ball investigates how anesthesia works. Many drugs work more or less in a "lock-and-key" fashion. They block biochemical processes because they precisely match the shape of specific molecules' binding sites. And this seems to be how some classes of anesthetics, including barbiturates, interrupt communication between the neurons. But there is a befuddling diversity to the substances that can knock people out: from large-molecule steroids to untethered individual atoms. Consider xenon, a gas that exists as lone atoms that don't undergo ordinary chemical interactions with anything else. These bland, unresponsive balls are about as far away as they can imagine from the exquisitely shaped molecules of most drugs. Yet today xenon is a fairly common anesthetic