Anesthesia awareness is the phenomenon of patients waking up during surgery. This issue has been involved in the challenges to lethal injection and the pending Supreme Court case of Baze v. Rees. One proposed solution to the problem is a device that measures "bispectral index" or BIS. The monitor gives a simple digital reading that is supposed to assure that the patient (or murderer) is actually unconscious. However, the effectiveness of this device is challenged in research published in yesterday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. AP story here; Washington University School of Medicine press release here; NEJM abstract and citation here. (Full text of the article requires a subscription or $10.)