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A T the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1970s, a circulating nurse was designated to maintain a list of all malignant hyperthermia (MH) family surnames taped to the inside of the swinging doors to the operating suite to be cross-checked by everyone responsible for preoperatively evaluating a patient. Efforts to avoid trigger agents at all costs in those at heightened susceptibility by family history led to risky and often unpleasant alternative anesthetic regimens. Imagine, for example, induction and maintenance of anesthesia for an upper abdominal procedure in a difficult airway patient at risk for MH before introduction of fiber-optic laryngoscopy and nontrigger IV anesthetics. Lethality of the syndrome during the two decades that elapsed between its recognition and its suppression by dantrolene engendered waking nightmares in the care of probands who triggered in the absence of advanced warning. In the current issue, Pollock et al.2 provide a learned account of Keith Ellis’s tenacious and articulated efforts to identify the site of action of dantrolene within the sarcolemma of skeletal muscle. Ellis’s discovery motivated investigation of components of the excitation–contraction coupling triad as molecular candidates for MH pathogenesis in the face of alternative lipid, central nervous system, catechol, and other MH theories that prevailed until the 1990s.3,4 As eloquently detailed by Pollock et al., Ellis and his coworkers bent diverse experimental models to their purpose in testing dantrolene’s potential sites of action, spanning the central nervous system to the periphery. With these data in hand, Ellis was primed for the cognitive leap in perceiving that dantrolene may have utility in the treatment of MH. He sought a collaborator able to perform a first trial of dantrolene in the swine model of MH and forwarded stocks to Gaisford Harrison. Rescue of seven of eight pigs from certain death by MH at Ellis’s instigation has since saved thousands of lives and loosened one of anesthesiology’s most terrifying shackles.5 With Pollock et al. as guides, readers of Ellis’s original manuscripts will be rewarded by familiarity with a chain of experiments that serves as a model of its kind. In bringing Ellis’s discoveries once again to light, Pollock et al.’s survey impels the reader to consider what technical advances of comparable magnitude may be identified in contemporary anesthesiology. The current editorial addresses why so little comes to mind. Looking back, the period of Ellis’s inquiries stands as a demarcation at the dawn of an incredible quickening in the practice of anesthesia in the two decades that were to follow (table 1). Conversely, innovations in anesthesia care from 1995 to the present have been less generous and of a different order, with a shift in focus from the introduction of disruptive technical advances in drugs and devices to the regulation of caregiver behaviors. What accounts for this shift? I suggest that the decline in innovation in anesthesia care over the past two decades may be traced to the specialty’s envelopment by a culture of complacency coupled to a culture of compliance. It has been alleged that “By adhering to the six sigma approach, the anesthesia community has reduced mortality attributable directly to anesthesia so significantly that it is now almost Malignant Hypercompliance