The vervets, however, will drink anything from laboratory alcohol to St. Kitts rum, which they prefer because of the familiar smell of the island's sugar cane, which ferments naturally. Unlike the vervets, most primate species will not naturally drink alcohol unless they are specifically taught or manipulated by researchers. While monkeys that are social drinkers prefer their alcohol sweetened, the steady and binge drinkers like drinking only alcohol and water, at about the same concentration as a whiskey and soda, roughly 20 per cent. We never give them only alcohol, and we have not used any kinds of behavioural manipulations to increase alcohol consumption. Because of their alcoholic predisposition, and the fact that vervet monkeys share about 96 per cent of their genetic composition with humans, Palmour hopes that her team's upcoming map of the vervet genome will yield more clues in the study of genetic-likelihood alcoholism and other complex disorders such as hypertension and anxiety.
Alcoholism is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in Canada, and one of the most costly.
Before the 1960s, alcoholism was thought to be purely learned behaviour, the result of environmental factors. Palmour, however, joined McGill in 1982 to work on the growing evidence of a genetic vulnerability, which can be promoted or inhibited by the environment. These monkeys are not under social stress, they live in a beautiful tropical paradise, they don't have economic problems or deprivation. And yet they drink. So we hope that by knowing more about what those biological components are, we'll have better ways of intervening and, ideally, preventing problems before they occur in potential human alcoholics.