Factors Underlying Differences in Alcohol Preference Among Inbred Strains

A conceptual framework is presented that relates behavior pathology, behavior genetics, and the concept of mechanism-specific behavior to the study of alcohol preference of inbred mice as an approach to the understanding of human alcoholism. The programmatic work on alcohol preference of mice is reviewed. Genetic, enzymatic, nutritional, experiential, and stimulus variables are considered. Under appropriate circumstances, voluntary ingestion of sweetened alcohol by appropriate strains is shown to raise rate of mortality and to induce liver pathology similar to that found in some types or stages of human alcoholism.