SOME people may drink too much in an attempt to compensate for a faulty body-clock gene that locks them into a state of perpetual jet lag. The discovery could explain why an existing drug helps a few alcoholics stay dry.
Urs Albrecht and his team at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland studied mice with a defect in Per2, a key clock gene that helps set and maintain our 24-hour body cycle. Given the chance, the mutant mice drank three times as much alcohol as non-mutant mice. The team found that the hypothalamus, the brain area housing the body’s…
