From Aerospace, Hyperbaric and Undersea Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina (J.G.M.) Department of Pathology, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California (S.H.R.); and National Marine Mammal Foundation, San Diego, California (S.H.R.).
Anesthesiology. 2018 Jul;129(1):11-21. doi: 10.1097/ALN.0000000000002213.
It is important for academic-minded human anesthesiologists to have an interdisciplinary perspective when engaging in cutting-edge research as well as the practice of human anesthesiology. This was a philosophy promoted by Dr. Robert Dripps, former pioneering Chairman of the Anesthesiology Department at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Many human and veterinary anesthesiologists as well as biomedical engineers and neuroscientists benefited from Dr. Dripps's constructive outlook personified in the quest to develop dolphin anesthesiology.The motivation to anesthetize dolphins came from the fact that scientists and physicians wanted to study the brain of the dolphin, a brain as large as man's. Also, investigators wanted to develop anesthesia for the dolphin in order to study the electrophysiology of the dolphin's highly sophisticated auditory system, which facilitates the dolphin's amazing echolocation capability.Dolphin anesthesia involves a complex matter of unique neural control, airway anatomy, neuromuscular control of respiration, and sleep behavior.
对于学术型的人类麻醉学家来说，在从事前沿研究以及进行人类麻醉学实践时，拥有跨学科的视角非常重要。这是宾夕法尼亚大学（宾夕法尼亚州费城）麻醉学系前主任罗伯特·德里普斯博士所倡导的理念。许多人类和兽医麻醉师、生物医学工程师和神经科学家都受益于德里普斯博士的建设性观点，这种观点体现在开发海豚麻醉学的探索中。对海豚进行麻醉的动机来自于这样一个事实，即科学家和医生希望研究海豚的大脑，因为海豚的大脑与人脑一样大。此外，研究人员还希望为海豚开发麻醉剂，以便研究海豚高度复杂的听觉系统的电生理学，这有助于海豚发挥其惊人的回声定位能力。海豚麻醉涉及到独特的神经控制、气道解剖学、呼吸的神经肌肉控制以及睡眠行为等复杂问题。
