Professor of Psychology Bruce Hetzler is fond of reminding his students that
there are no safe drugs, only drugs used safely. He should know. For the
past 28 years, Hetzler has been studying the effects of a wide range of chemicals
on the brain. While his work focuses primarily on the effects of alcohol,
he has published research on 15 different drugs, ranging from nicotine and
caffeine, to naltrexone, a medication used in the treatment of alcoholism,
and physostigmine, an enzyme inhibitor extracted from calabar beans used
in the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Some of his most significant research
has dealt with the interactions between drugs and body temperature and how
altered body temperature in turn produces secondary effects on the drugs.
Shortly after joining the Lawrence psychology department in 1976, Hetzler
chose a research paradigm using alcohol because of its relatively inexpensive
cost and intrinsic ability to actively engage students in collaborative research,
a decision that has resulted in numerous research articles co-authored by
his students. Most recently the article “Nicotine alters flash-evoked
potentials in Long-Evans rats,” published in the journal Pharmacology,
Biochemistry, and Behavior, was co-written with Maraty Theinpeng, ’03.
In September, Hetzler presented research co-authored by Elizabeth Martin, ’04,
titled “Nicotine-alcohol interactions in the rat visual system” at
the 12th World Congress on Biomedical Alcohol Research in Mannheim, Germany.
An abstract of that research was published earlier this year in the journal
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Pictured with Professor
Hetzler is Elizabeth Florek, ’04.
