Still No Explanation for Scientists Who Are Addicted to Their Research

Bioinformaticists at Peking University in Beijing published a paper in PLoS Computational Biology that linked 396 common genes to drug addiction, reports a news story. The pathways they focused on were those for addiction to cocaine, opiates, alcohol, and nicotine. After mining data from thousands of peer-reviewed genetic studies, they identified 1,500 human addiction-related genes, of which about 400 were found to be common in some 20 molecular pathways. The scientists then developed KARG, the first annotated molecular database for addiction-related genes.