  Although more than 150 years have past since the discovery of general
anesthetics, how they precisely work remains a mystery. We propose a novel
unitary mechanism of general anesthesia verifiable by experiments. In the
proposed mechanism, general anesthetics perturb oxygen pathways in both
membranes and oxygen-utilizing proteins such that the availabilities of oxygen
to its sites of utilization are reduced which in turn triggers cascading
cellular responses through oxygen-sensing mechanisms resulting in general
anesthesia. Despite the general assumption that cell membranes are readily
permeable to oxygen, exiting publications indicate that these membranes are
plausible oxygen transport barriers. The present hypothesis provides a unified
framework for explaining phenomena associated with general anesthesia and
experimental results on the actions of general anesthetics. If verified by
experiments, the proposed mechanism also has other significant medical and
biological implications.
