When given the chance to consume alcohol at will, fruit flies
behave in ways that look an awful lot like human alcoholism.
That's according to a study published online on December 10th in
Current Biology that is one of the first to consider alcohol
self-administration in the insects. "The flies choose to consume
alcohol to intoxicating levels, they will do so even if alcohol
is made unpalatable, and they relapse to drinking high levels of
alcohol after being deprived of it," said Ulrike Heberlein of
the University of California, San Francisco. "Addiction is a
purely human condition, but, surprisingly, flies show several
key features of it." Heberlein's group has been studying the
genes underlying alcohol response and addiction using flies as a
model for many years. (They are the team that earlier this year
brought us the "happy hour" gene, which influences flies'
susceptibility to alcohol's sedative effects.) Heberlein says
she is a strong believer that the fly is a useful model of human
conditions. Even so,