Flies Offered Unlimited Alcohol Behave a Lot Like Human Alcoholics

. . . Flies are attracted to the smell of the alcohol, the researchers show, but they actually don't like its taste. They will put aside their aversion to particular tastes or smells in order to consume it, and they will rapidly return to high levels of ethanol consumption after a period of imposed abstinence.

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.

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