Human neuroscience at National Institute on Drug Abuse: implications for genetics research.

It is becoming clear that there is a genetic component to drug abuse. Family studies, adoption studies, and critical twin studies have all pointed to some genetic vulnerability or risk factors for an individual to abuse psychoactive drugs depending on certain psychopathologies in the biological parents and/or parents' own drug use. The question for the next generation of research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is to apply the rapidly developing technology in molecular genetics in an effort to determine the candidate genes contributing to the risk.