This Worm Can Handle Its Alcohol

By modifying their genetic makeup to alter a molecular channel that binds alcohol in the brain, scientists have developed worms that can’t get drunk:

Normally, when worms are put in a petri dish that contains alcohol, they become drunk. For a worm, this mean not being able to wiggle from side to side as much. It also means crawling much more slowly. But with the modified channel, the worms acted just as they did without the alcohol. The researchers were able to do this by tweaking the human alcohol target just enough to prevent “a research model worm from getting drunk,” said Jonathan Pierce-Shimomura, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study, in an email to The Verge. …

The researchers now hope to develop drugs that would have the same effect in mice — and eventually humans. “We found a way that future drugs may target a single human brain protein, called the BK channel, to stop alcohol from activating it and causing intoxication,” Pierce-Shimomura said. If the scientists could find a drug that has the same effect as the mutation, they might be able to help people overcome addiction and the effects of withdrawal.

But Becky Ferreira cautions against celebrating too soon:

As promising as the findings sound, it will likely be many years before they will be tested on humans. And as Motherboard’s Michael Byrne warned a few weeks back,“off-switches” for addictions may be tantalizing, but they won’t necessarily be cure-alls. For now, we’ll just have to be satisfied with the fact that the great enterprise of science has gifted the world a bunch of mutant worms that can’t get drunk.