University Daily Kansan
Friday, April 9, 1971
5
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Animals Shot with Booze To Find 'Sober Up' Pill
By ROSE LEE
Some day it may be possible to take a "sober up" pill for that long drive home.
Carlton K. Erickson, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology, has discovered that alcohol can reverse the effects an alcohol could be reversed in laboratory animals by giving them a drug that works on the nervous system.
In a recent interview, he said he thought it would be "a very long time—at least 10 to 20 years" before he could things could be amplified to buy them.
In studies to find what alcohol does to the brain, he discovered that alcohol depresses the release or functioning of acetylcholine in
ERICKSON EXPLAINED that acetylleoline, a chemical secreted by nerves, was thought to allow impulses to travel between the instinct and determine an instinct, response and other nervous responses.
"We're trying to show that alcohol causes intoxication by interfering with the function of acetylcholine," he said.
"If we know what alcohol is doing to cause intoxication, maybe we can give drugs to humans to prevent it just as we have physostigmine to prevent excesses of intoxication in animals."
If the same thing happens in humans that happens in animals, then giving a drug that acts like acetylcholine could, perhaps, prevent the intoxicated action and maintain hangover effects of alcohol.
HE EMPHASIZED that physiostigmine was "only a pharmacological tool" that was being used to determine the
"It is not the drug that the human is going to take in the future to sober up," he said.
Erickson explained that alcohol was thought to depress action in two major portions of the brain, specifically the cortex and the reticular formation.
The cerebral cortex, the outer
Drug Mixture Provides Cure For Leukemia
CHICAGO (UPI)—Leukemia in children, once fatal in nearly all cases, is no longer an incurable disease, according to doctors at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Teen.
"One half of all victims of the disease can now obtain a five-year leukemia-free remission pattern and be given remission pattern of children currently free of leukemia in these studies," Dr. Rhomes J. Aur said in a report Thursday to the American Association for Cancer Research.
Until recent years, childhood lymphocytic leukemia, the most common type, was fatal in all but one per cent of the cases, he said.
The reticular formation is located at the base of the brain and normally functions to keep a person awake.
layer or gray matter, controls emotions, motivation, judgment and motor activities such as walking and talking.
ONE OF THE problems in using laboratory animals to study alcohol is that animals differ from humans in their response to alcohol. Hence, findings in animals would not apply to humans. Erickson said.
Mice, rats and rabbits, the animals used in the laboratory experiments, don't like alcohol or vinegar. It is, therefore, injected into a
Science News
vein.
"Since animals can't talk and we don't know if they make judgments, the only way they judge is by sight. When intoxicated, they are unable to do simple tasks such as pressing a bar for food or water or climbing an inline in their mouth so they can them go to sleep," he said.
ALCOHOL IS AN addicting drug in humans, but this property
has not been easy to demonstrate in animals. Erickson said.
He said alcohol was known to cause sleep; slowing of electrical activity was recorded by electroencephalogram (EEG) changes; and a decreased concentration measured in fluid taken from the cerebral cortex and reticular system.
Erickson said he found that psychosignature, when it was given by the doctor, could help sleepy time and prevented Eight effects caused by i-incubation.
In addition, he found that the effect of physostigmine on the muscle tone of rats was neutralized or blocked by the administration of atropine prior to exercise.
"We also THINK that postdisgnose will reverse the acidity of acetylcholine caused by alcohol, however we haven't tested this."
Erickson has been studying the effects of alcohol on the brain for four years. The studies are part of a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and $10,000 grain from the Licensed Drug Abuse Program.
His assistants include William Burnam, Wichita, and Kyong Thai, Korea graduate students, Tim Huffman, Australia, graduate student.
Kansas Staff Photos
Graham, left, and Erickson
...conduct study of alcohol's effects
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Lucky Fish Make Pets
WASHINGTON (UPI)—The government said Thursday 84 million live fish and 14 million other animals were imported into the United States last year. The lucky ones became pets, but most of the others went to scientific experiments.
Interior Secretary Rogers C. B. Mention was said that the more fortune imports. They were tropical varities destined for home use.
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