By Andrew Petropulos
On Thursday, Nov. 11, Fuller Arts Center was packed with students, faculty and members of the public for the annual Britton C. and Lucille McCabe Lecture. Each year, an expert in health and physical sciences is invited to speak about current research in their area of expertise. This year, Neuroscientist Elizabeth J. Crofton was invited to speak about her research on factors affecting alcoholism in mice.
Crofton currently teaches at Emmanuel College in Boston. Prior to her professorship, Crofton was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied the neurobiology of alcohol consumption at the cellular level in animal models.
“I took a class in undergrad on drug addiction and the science about it,” Crofton said. “That got me really interested in that field. The fact that drugs can do anything to us and we’ve really enjoyed taking substances throughout human history.” Recently, Crofton has studied how sex, environmental enrichment and caffeine affect alcohol consumption in mouse populations.
Beginning the lecture with background information on the science of alcohol consumption, Crofton introduced its metabolism, its mechanisms on the neurotransmitter level, and certain health risks. The rest of the lecture was spent summarizing recent research, and highlighting the general persistence needed in scientific research.
The research lab, led by Crofton, is otherwise run by undergraduate students. Passionate about teaching, she chose her postdoc to be teaching-oriented, while also allowing her to carry out her drug research.
“If you’re interested at all in any of this, talk to your professors and see if you can get involved in research,” Crofton said. “That really helped me. A lot of my students try research and they think, ‘I don’t know if this is for me’, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, actually, this is really cool. I’m having fun taking care of the mice and doing science.’ So I would just say try it out and see.”
The research presented in the lecture highlighted the behavioral science behind certain causal factors believed to be contributing to alcohol disorders. Her mice populations indicated that female populations were more likely to consume more alcohol if they were placed in isolation instead of a rich environment of resources and other mice. The same results were not found in males. Additionally, caffeine was found to have mixed effects on alcohol consumption.
While the preliminary research is far from proving the same is true for human populations, showing how alcoholism can be attributed to complex environmental factors and neurobiological mechanisms highlights the need to reduce stigmatizing the disorder.
“I think drug addiction in general has such a history of a negative stigma against people that are suffering with addiction,” Crofton said. “And I think that a lot of people think it’s a sort of a moral failing that they’ve decided to keep using despite all the harmful consequences. But that’s really not the case. There’s brain changes. It’s not something that they control. So I think that’s the biggest thing in addiction research is how people say, ‘Why are you looking at that? They should just get over it.’ I would say that’s the biggest thing.”
Photo courtesy of Springfield College