In the past, drinking alcohol in high amounts and alcoholism were regarded as a moral decline or a vice. At the beginning of the 19th century the “drinking problem” was identified, from the medical point of view, with a disease.
Complete recognition of alcohol addiction was achieved only in the 20th century, but there were still voices that described it as a “behavioral deviation” or “bad habit”. Nowadays pathologists are fighting against such conceptions with the following evidence: the concept “illness” as applied to alcoholism is in perfect accordance with the most recent model of disease: the bio-psycho-social concept. One may also state that alcoholism involves medical therapy as any other disease does, but such theories can induce some “taboo” misconceptions in ordinary people.
Two main research directions can be identified in what concerns the inheritance of alcoholism (Tudose et al, 2000):
- identification of candidate genes which predispose to alcoholism for humans and comparison with various animal models;
- the study of variability regarding alcohol induced behavior in human populations and families.
Humans are very different in what concerns the drinking motivations and the inherited predisposition to alcoholism. The genetic factors of this variability are certainly different in comparison to the genetic factors which generate the variability of species (Quian, 2005).
There are many studies that prove the existence of a strong correlation between inheritance and alcoholism. There are, also, many studies that identified candidate genes for alcoholism, but it is obvious that classical mendelian rules cannot be applied to this complex, multifactorial trait (Dick et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2005). | 
