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- Jul 26, 2009
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science...rk-study-in-the-origins-of-alcoholism/563372/ Eric Augier, who recently joined Heilig?s team, tried a different approach?one pioneered in his former laboratory to study cocaine addiction. After training rats to self-administer alcohol, he offered them some sugary water, too. This better mimics real life, in which drugs exist simultaneously with other pleasurable substances. Given a choice between booze and nectar, most rats chose the latter. But not all of them: Of the 32 rats that Augier first tested, four ignored the sugar and kept on shooting themselves up with alcohol. ?Four rats is laughable,? says Heilig, referring to the study?s small size, ?but 620 rats later, no one?s laughing.? Augier repeated the experiment with more rats of various breeds, and always got the same results. Consistently, 15 percent of them choose alcohol over sugar?the same number as the proportion of human drinkers who progress to alcoholism. Those alcohol-preferring rats showed other hallmarks of human addiction, too. They spend more effort to get a sip of alcohol than their sugar-preferring peers, and they kept on drinking even when their booze supply was spiked with an intensely bitter chemical or paired with an electric shock. ?That was striking to me, as a clinician,? says Heilig. ?Embedded in the criteria for diagnosing alcoholism is that people continue to take drugs despite good knowledge of the fact that it will harm or kill them.? (not sure how to make this a quote)
