The Overton in Meyer-Overton: a biographical sketch commemorating the 150th anniversary of Charles Ernest Overtones birth

摘要

Hardly any discourse on anesthetic mechanisms avoids mention of the Meyer-Overton rule. Thanks to the eponymous rule, Charles Ernst Overton (1865-1933) enjoys together with Hans Horst Meyer (1853-1939) the highest name recognition where anesthetic mechanisms are concerned (Fig. 1). It may therefore come as a surprise, especially for clinicians, that the work underlying Overton's contribution to the Meyer-Overton rule was merely a by-product of Overton's principal body of scientific work; his lifelong interest in the movement of substances between the environment and the interior of living cells. Before his anesthesia-related publication1 and the subsequent coining of the Meyer-Overton hypothesis, this body of work had led to the 'Overton rule'.2 Overton's work had far-reaching consequences well beyond anaesthesia. It became one of the foundation stones for the conceptualization of the boundary between cell protoplasm and its environment (known today as the cell membrane) and anticipated by several decades the understanding of impulse propagation in excitable membranes. Moreover, his contributions to structure-activity data, to toxicology, and to plant chemistry and genetics are also notable.