welcome

Some time ago, the phone rang and Lou Bartek from geology was on the line. He was reluctant to call, he said, but a colleague had insisted that he tell us about his journey to Antarctica — the icy voyage he and his students would make to extract a record of global climate change. One hour later, when I hung up the phone, I was still on a secondhand high. Lou Bartek is the sort of geology junkie who intoxicates people like me with his mind-bending fever for groundbreaking work. Naturally, he's irritated by red tape and campus politics and budget woes, but he'll endure them all if it means he can put a trip together and launch his gear and his students out to where the data are waiting — not in the circuits of computers but fresh and alive in the wild, frozen world. In short, Lou Bartek is an addict. An addict of science.

I have known many such addicts. Away from their work they are edgy, impatient. But as soon as they reach the familiar environs of their lab, or venture into the field with their students in tow, you can see the effects of the place in their blood. They are blissfully drunk on the nectar of provocative problems and freshly bloomed ideas. They are hooked.

There is something in the human brain that seeks this kind of transfiguring experience, this unfettered romp through the realm of the mind. And when we do not find it in the natural course of our days, we may yield to its surrogates — alcohol or drugs. For many years, an argument raged between those who believed that drug abuse was solely a matter of biology and those who believed that it had to do with environment and learning. The scientists here who study addiction have long since outgrown that dispute. They have seen that the causes are inseparable, that the chemistry of addiction reacts to the life of the mind.

But what exactly is addiction? Can it be cured? So far, the answers are sketchy, but researchers from several departments on campus are steadily building the models that show how addiction reorders our chemistry and forces its roots through our lives. If any group can put the whole picture together, this one can. Because, like Lou Bartek, they are addicts too.

Neil Caudle is editor of Endeavors magazine.