Moms and their babies the focus of breakthrough research

Norman "Skip" Spear

Early in his career, Spear wrote a theoretical paper with Byron Campbell, a colleague from nearby Princeton, who "got him going" on developmental learning and memory retrieval. They maintained that Sigmund Freud's theory of infantile amnesia had a biological basis and that memory was a human/animal bio-orientation and not a social condition as Freud believed.

Spear moved to Binghamton University in 1974 because it was a great opportunity and he found that he enjoyed the less crowded feeling of the area around the University. Upon reflection, he comments that he "couldn't have had a better research opportunity."

In the 1970s Spear and colleague Steve Lisman, a clinical psychologist, began to research the notion of "state dependent retention." Simply put, this is the idea that if you learned something when you were intoxicated, you later were able to recall that learning only while in the same state. This research was attractive because it could be studied with humans or animals. Unfortunately, they found that working with human subjects proved to be problematic. Because the drinking age was lower at that time, Spear was able to use college students as subjects, but found that the levels of alcohol needed to study state dependent retention were too high to reasonably give to them. "We found ourselves having to entertain a room full of students, because we couldn't send them back to their dorms in that state," he said. It was then that he began focusing more on working with rat subjects.

As an altricial mammal, the rat, much like a human, is born in a very immature and helpless condition and requires care for some time. This characteristic makes it an ideal subject for tracing the development of basic processes. The ability to study rats at a very early age facilitated Spear's study of the effects of early exposure to alcohol.
Scientists already knew the effects of heavy alcohol consumption on fetuses, as described in the definition of fetal alcohol syndrome. Spear took his research a step back and considered the effects of the mother's "social drinking" on an unborn fetus.

Working with the information that a fetus can detect both the odor and taste of alcohol through the mother's blood and amniotic fluid, Spear theorized that fetuses or infants who experienced alcohol's taste in association with pharmacological effects would then seek it out as adults.

Interestingly, he found that infant rats love alcohol. Even at the tender age of three hours old, infant rats show the same level of desire for alcohol that they do for milk and, if given the opportunity, will consume massive quantities. On the contrary, adult rats dislike alcohol and have to be tricked into drinking it by adding sweeteners or other flavors.

While the reasoning behind this behavior has not been determined, Spear and his colleagues continue to study the reinforcing properties of alcohol on infants. Whether it is the odor and flavor of the alcohol that the infants respond to, or the pharmacological effects on the brain, the researchers have been able to link early alcohol exposure to a disposition to drink alcohol later in life.

Spear and his colleagues have been quoted in the media recently and their input sheds a new light on what is already known about alcohol exposure to the young. While there are numerous avenues for very early alcohol exposure, Spear noted that even in America doctors encourage women to have a drink before breastfeeding their infants in order to relax both mother and baby. Researchers have also found that babies exposed to alcohol in the home often prefer playthings with the same smell, and exposure to alcohol in early life may increase its attractiveness and lead to the onset of drinking at an earlier age than otherwise would occur.

With thousands of hours of research in his background, and information from colleagues around the world, Spear proudly points to the wall of photos of his children and grandchildren displayed in his office. His eye is on the future and the benefits that his findings may have on generations of children ahead.

His research continues, and he comments that he tries to pick "research topics with an endpoint in mind." For Spear it's an endpoint that can benefit mothers and babies, and may one day help to identify the factors that cause humans (especially adolescents) to have a disposition for alcohol -- and that is a noble cause.