Nora Volkow has never been one to blindly accept convention. As a child in Mexico City, she would hunt down the source material cited in her textbooks and spend hours immersed in the intricacies of the Spanish conquest of Mexico or the geography of Indonesia. Diving deep instead of sticking to her assignments was not the best way to get good grades, she admits. But that curiosity began to pay off when she discovered biology. Volkow was named the best medical student of her class in 1981 at the National University of Mexico, and she went on to break new ground in the field of addiction research. As a young researcher at the University of Texas, she was the first to show that cocaine changes the human brain. A controversial idea at the time, it is now widely accepted. Later, Volkow used cutting-edge brain-scanning tools to pinpoint not only the physical changes wrought by addiction, but also the inherited brain abnormalities that make some people more vulnerable to it. Her work provided a potent rejoinder to anyone arguing that addiction was simply a matter of willpower. (At the time, first lady Nancy Reagan was urging everyone to “just say no.”) Revolutionary ideas are part of Volkow’s heritage. Her great-grandfather was Leon Trotsky, the Marxist revolutionary theorist and Soviet Bolshevik leader assassinated on the orders of Joseph Stalin. Volkow and her three sisters grew up in the Mexico City house where Trotsky lived out his exile and was murdered in 1940.
Volkow, who has directed the National Institute on Drug Abuse since 2003, is still challenging assumptions. In recent years, she has raised eyebrows for proposing that the same neural mechanisms behind cocaine and alcohol addiction also underlie eating disorders that lead to obesity.
Discover contributing editor Adam Piore talked with the 58-year-old in her office in Bethesda, Md. Volkow, a wiry long-distance runner with a lively demeanor and a slight accent, spoke about everything from the implications of her work on the neuroscience of addiction to the nature of evil.
