Dr Edmond I. Eger II, a leader in the development of a now universally used technique to determine the proper dose of anesthetic gas administered in operating rooms died on Aug 26, reports The New York Times.

Dr. Eger devised a method working with Dr. Giles Merkel, Dr. Lawrence Saidman and other anesthesiologists at the University of California, San Francisco. They identified one value to use as a benchmark: the concentration of anesthesia at which 50 percent of patients did not move in response to a painful stimulus, like being cut with a scalpel.