In October of 1972, a graduate student named Candace Pert rocked the field of neuroscience—changing it forever—when she and her colleagues discovered the opiate receptor in the brain. Since then, Pert has not only proven herself a brilliant scientist, but has become a guru in alternative medicine's mind-body movement. So why is she so controversial?
On a late summer night in Potomac, Maryland, I sit in the rustic home of neuroscientist Candace Pert, watching while she speaks into a small, plastic toy called a Yalp. The Yalp records what you say, and then plays it backward. In that backward flow, contends Pert, you can hear hidden meanings, garbled words, portents. Your subconscious surfaces. It's kind of like cracking the code of the Beatles' White Album. Or listening to an aural Rorschach.
Pert, who is in her early fifties, and has a short, tangled mop of brown hair and a big, comfortable body, stares at the Yalp in her hands, as if a genie might emerge from it at any moment.
"I don't know about this book tour thing," she finally says, referring to the upcoming publication of her Molecules of Emotion (Scribner), an exploration of the biology behind feelings. "It just scares me to death!" Then she tosses the toy to her husband, fellow scientist and research partner Michael Ruff, a stocky 44-year-old with light brown hair and glasses. He yelps her message a few times. The gravelly voice is out of some late night film noir, with snatches of almost-words—eerily misplaced in this sprawling wooden house with its wraparound deck, pool, and hot-tub out back. Pert interprets the apparent gibberish as best she can:
"'What did you think, the books would never relax?' See, it means I'm never going to relax."
Then she instructs me to try the Yalp, to say anything, but to speak with emotion, because "emotion is what creates the hidden message." That's a surprising statement from a neuroscientist, but emotion is the lodestone of Pert's work and life. She was one of the key researchers who, a quarter of a century ago, discovered and mapped the brain's opiate receptors. A receptor has often been described as a chemical lock on a cell, into which a particular substance, or key, fits. In truth, notes Pert, receptors are far more fluid and amazing than locks. A typical nerve cell has millions of receptors on its surface, dancing and vibrating, each waiting for another molecule to wander by and bind to it. When the two join into one, the receptor changes shape, and that shift sends a message into the cell itself.
"It was the killer experiment of my dreams," she recalls of the study that first proved that the brain is hard wired to respond to the body's internal morphine. "It didn't matter if you were a lab rat, a first lady, or a dope addict—everyone had the exact same mechanism in the brain for creating bliss."
That single finding opened up a monumental new field of research and led to the discovery of the body's natural opiates, known as endorphins. "The study of the opiate receptor became so incredibly hot," recalls Pert, "that world-class scientists from all over were coming into the field. It became totally interdisciplinary." Eventually, a class of tiny proteins known as peptides—including the opiates and serotonin—were found to regulate our behavior, mood, and health.
Our bodies are studded with peptide receptors. For Pert, this means consciousness operates at a cellular level, involving the mating dance of each receptor and the particular peptide that binds to it. Or, as she puts it, "Your subconscious mind is really your body. Peptides are the biochemical correlate of emotion." She has even stated that our white blood cells, which boast many of the same receptors and chemicals as the brain, are "bits of the brain floating around the body." She's talking a kind of molecular psychology, a true biology of emotions.
Part mystic, part scientist, Pert herself is nothing if not emotional—controversial, flamboyant, embracing, bossy, flirtatious, at moments unabashedly neurotic and even over-the-top—a woman who meditates daily and is friendly with Deepak Chopra, shows up at a cousin's past-life regression therapy group, and still publishes papers in Science about substances like chemoattractants and octapeptides. And her cup overflows with stories, from the bitter, public rift with her mentor, Sol Snyder, to the scientific conference where, while speaking of new research into peptides and AIDS, she heard what she jokingly calls "the voice of God" murmuring in her ear. From the beginning, Pert has stood apart, an outspoken, iconoclastic female in the male bastion of science.
From Lab Rat to Faith Healer
"To think I'm being viewed as a healer—God forbid, a faith healer!" says Candace Pert when I first meet her and Micheal Ruff at a restaurant in New York City. The couple is exhausted from a long day of fundraising for their research on Peptide T, which they believe may help prevent the wasting and demetia caused by the AIDS virus. It seems that the virus attaches to a crucial receptor on the immune system's T4 cells, thus preventing the cells from recieving peptides that are vital to their health and to the health of the entire organism. Peptide T—so named because its dominant component is the amino acid threonine—might offer a strategy to fight the virus.
