Meyer, Hans Horst

Professor Meyer was born at Dorpat, Estonia, on September 29, 1883, the elder son of Hans Horst Meyer—who held the chair of experimental pharmacology at the University of Vienna and formulated the modern theory of narcosis known as the Overton-Meyer theory. Two years later, his father became professor at Marburg/Lahn, and it was in this city that Kurt H. Meyer had his early education. The scholarly atmosphere in which he matured, where chemistry and medicine were always very much in the foreground, was to influence him throughout his lifetime. From his father, he inherited his desire for scientific study and research, and from his mother, his taste for the fine arts. His younger brother became a famous heart-surgeon. 

The first chemical clue relating the structure of anesthetics to their potency was discovered in 1899 by a pharmacologist, Hans Horst Meyer, and an anesthetist, Charles Ernst Overton. Working independently, Meyer and Overton noted a strong correlation between the polarity of a compound and its potency as an anesthetic. They expressed polarity as the oil/gas partition coefficient, while anesthetic potency was expressed as the partial pressure in atmospheres. Figure 11.10 is a Meyer-Overton correlation for 18 anesthetics used on mice. Note that olive oil is used, and it has become the most commonly used reference solvent. 

R. L. Lipnick, Trends Pharmacol. Sci., 10, 265 (1989). Hans Horst Meyer and the Lipoid Theory of Narcosis. 

Lipnick RL. Hans Horst Meyer and the lipoid theory of narcosis. Trends Pharmacol Sci 1989 10 265. 

QSAR studies date back to the nineteenth century. In 1863, A. F. A. Cros at the University of Strasbourg observed that toxicity of alcohols to mammals increased as the water solubility of the alcohols decreased. In the 1890s, Hans Horst Meyer of the University of Marburg and Charles Ernest Overton of the University of Zurich, working independently, noted that the toxicity of organic compounds depended on their lipophilicity. 

The discovery of a parameter (olive oil/water partition coefficient) upon which a mechanistic interpretation for narcosis could be based was made independently six years later by Charles Ernest Overton at the University of Zurich (30-31) and by Hans Horst Meyer (32) and his collaborator Fritz Baum (33) at the University of Marburg. Prior to this discovery, Walter Dunzelt, a student of Meyer, attempted to confirm the Houdaille data on the relationship between water solubility and minimum toxic concentration, using tadpoles and small fish (34). 

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