A Landmark Study on the Origins of Alcoholism

For Markus Heilig, the years of dead ends were starting to grate.

A seasoned psychiatrist, Heilig joined the National Institutes of Health in 2004 with grand ambitions of finding new ways to treat addiction and alcoholism. “It was the age of the neuroscience revolution, and all this new tech gave us many ways of manipulating animal brains,” he recalls. By studying addictive behavior in laboratory rats and mice, he would pinpoint crucial genes, molecules, and brain regions that could be targeted to curtail the equivalent behaviors in people.

It wasn’t to be. The insights from rodent studies repeatedly proved to be irrelevant. Many researchers and pharmaceutical companies . “We cured alcoholism in every rat we ever tried,” says Heilig, who is now at Linköping University in Sweden. “And at the end ofBut everything we took from these animal models to the clinic failed. We needed to go back to the drawing board.”