Dan works as an NHS consultant in anaesthetics and intensive care, while Polly is a consultant in sport and exercise medicine.
These drugs, commonly used in larger doses as anaesthetics, are thought to work by enhancing the brain's sensitivity to a depressant neurotransmitter known as GABA that is naturally present there.
This means that anaesthetics are less likely to stick to it if it is destabilised.
Herbal medicine—"green medicine"—is said to account now for some 80% of prescriptions, while acupuncture serves in place of anaesthetics for minor surgery.Not everyone has great faith in such remedies.
The extent to which a protein has been destabilised can therefore be measured by how radioactive it becomes in a given period of time.The stability curves for albumin at different temperatures and pressures turn out to have the same sort of shape as the curves for the effectiveness of anaesthetics (those of myoglobin do not match at all).
Subsequent research has shown that anaesthetics can, indeed, bind to protein molecules, and can sometimes affect their function as a result.
Anaesthetics might achieve this either by making the shape of a protein so stable that it cannot flex in response to docking and undocking molecules, or so unstable that the docking port loses its shape.
Perhaps refugee camps should be supplied not only with anaesthetics but a wide range of recordings.
Safer anaesthetics and keyhole surgery have meant that 85-year-olds now enjoy success rates in operations that would previously have been expected in 60-year-olds.
Work on glutamate receptors, which are responsible for stimulating the brain, suggests that these are, indeed, inhibited by anaesthetics.
But in contrast to this, John Mihic of the University of Colorado and his colleagues have recently made a case for anaesthetics working by increasing rather than decreasing the effects of receptor molecules in this case the receptors for GABA and glycine, two neurotransmitters that calm down excited synapses.
