Training

From habit to addiction: A slippery slope is a Science and Society event organised by the European Bioinformatics Institute and held at the Cambridge Union Society. Find out about the latest advances in scientific research and join the discussion about how this work impacts society.

Venue: Cambridge Union Society, 9A Bridge Street, Cambridge.

Wednesday 15 May 2013, 6:15 - 9:15pm (doors open at 6pm)

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Download the poster. 

The event is free and open to all. Please let us know you're coming so that we can ensure we have space for you. If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

Chair:

John Marioni, EMBL-EBI

Speakers:

 • Scott Vrecko, King's College London
 • Karen Ersche, University of Cambridge
 • Gunter Schumann, King's College London

About the event

We all have an occasional craving for something enjoyable to enhance our mood, whether it’s having a bar of chocolate, a couple of pints down the pub or smoking a cigarette. These activities may help us feel better, but when we become dependent on something to feel normal, the path to addiction is in front of us. 

The transition from occasional habit to chronic addiction may be a dominant factor in society's negative relationship to drugs, but how much do we know about the process of becoming addicted? Addiction can be thought of as a combination of factors including social, psychological and cultural, but what role does biology have in this process? Are some people predisposed to addiction? How does addiction affect our brains? To unravel this process we must consider how these different factors combine into one condition. 

Both social and cultural environments shape our attitudes towards addictive substances and excess. However the effect of personality or individual psychology cannot be underestimated. Are some people biologically more susceptible to developing addiction? Factors such as genetic susceptibility and neurological variations can greatly influence our risk of succumbing to addiction.

To construct an image of this complex condition we present the seventh annual EMBL-EBI Science and Society event 'From habit to addiction: A slippery slope?', bringing together three expert speakers for an evening of insightful talks and discussion.

Abstracts and biographies

Scott Vrecko: What’s wrong with addiction?

Scott will provide an overview of the historical and social science perspectives which challenge taken-for-granted ideas about the nature of addiction as a medical condition, and about the characteristics and effects of addictive drugs. It will examine changes in the way that researchers have studied addiction over time, including the expansion of medical conceptions of what things can and can’t be addictive, and will consider the extent to which scientific research on drugs and addiction can be considered as politically and/or morally neutral.

Biography

Scott Vrecko is a sociologist based in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College, London. His research, which has been funded by the ESRC, the Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, focuses on the political and cultural dynamics of medicine, health and illness. Scott was a founding member of the European Neuroscience and Society Network, a 5-year initiative funded by the European Science Foundation to explore the social dimensions of neuroscience; and he has guest-edited an interdisciplinary special issue of the journal, BioSocieties, on the theme of addiction, biology, and culture.

Karen Ersche: Lifting the veil on addiction vulnerability

Stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines are popular recreational drugs that are used by up to 56 million people worldwide. Despite their high addictive liability, not everyone who uses them develops dependence, but the risk is increased for individuals with a family history of addiction. This familial aggregation of drug and alcohol dependence suggests that either genetic factors, a shared family environment, or both underlie the increased risk for addiction in some people.

Karen's research into stimulant dependence compared personality traits and brain structure between 50 adults with stimulant dependence, their non-dependent siblings and 50 unrelated healthy volunteers who had neither a personal nor a family history of dependence. We found significantly higher levels of impulsive and compulsive personality traits among siblings compared to unrelated healthy volunteers. The pairs also shared abnormalities in brain regions that have been associated with drug addiction. Their findings shed new light on why the risk of becoming addicted to drugs is increased in people with a family history.

Biography

Karen Ersche is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. Karen's research focuses on the neuropsychological correlates and neurochemical processes underlying addictive behaviour and the translation of this knowledge into therapeutic interventions. This work involves a combination of approaches including neuroimaging, neuropsychological testing, and pharmacological intervention. Karen's present project investigates the question of causality, namely whether the neurobiological abnormalities seen in stimulant-dependent individuals are an effect of their long-term exposure to potentially neurotoxic drugs or whether these are the result of a genetic predisposition.

Gunter Schumann: Neurobehavioural analysis of reinforcement and its relevance for alcohol abuse

Adolescent behaviour has been associated with alcohol abuse and dependence later in life. Individual variability in certain 'reinforcement' behaviours (i.e. impulsivity, novelty seeking, reward dependence) predict the risk for addiction to develop and describe people's motivations for drug use. Investigating how motivational and emotional cues affect individual variability in reinforcement behaviour at the genetic, neurobiological and cognitive levels might inform us about neurobehavioural mechanisms conferring risk for addictions, thus potentially maximizing the efficacy and efficiency of early interventions.

As part of a long-term neuroimaging study, the researchers aim to identify the genetic and neurobiological basis of individual variation in reinforcement behaviour and to investigate how they may be used to predict the development of addictions and other psychiatric disorders. In this talk, Gunter will present the results of a genome-wide association study into alcohol drinking. The study has identified several novel alcohol-related genes. He will also discuss a novel mechanism underlying alcohol drinking behaviour. These findings are an important step along the road to developing targeted therapies for addictions.

Biography

Gunter Schumann is Professor of Biological Psychiatry at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, and Honorary Consultant at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust where he leads the challenging behaviour programme of the National Psychosis Unit. Before joining the Institute of Psychiatry in 2005, Prof. Schumann trained and worked at Harvard University, the University of Freiburg and the Central Institute of Mental Health, University of Heidelberg, Germany. His general research interests are in etiological and diagnostic stratification of psychiatric patients to identify neurobehavioural phenotypes, which allow the development of predictive and prognostic biomarkers. His group uses an interdisciplinary approach, using neuroimaging, functional genetic and epigenetic methods as well as molecular biological and bioinformatic techniques to identify neurobehavioural mechanisms of psychiatric disorders, including addictions.