It's a project the couple has been working on for 11 years, but in spite of initial encouraging experiments, other scientists have not been able to replicate their early results on AIDS. Still, Pert speculates that peptides may eventually spark a whole new generation of antiviral drugs. "Why do I never get a cold on a ski trip?" she muses. "Because I love to ski and it makes me happy and excited. The peptide norepinephrine is the chemical that stimulates excitement, and the cold virus uses the same receptors." When you're happy, the virus can't lock on to the receptors. That's why, she notes, depressed people get sick more often.
It's the kind of message that advocates of alternative medicine love, and Pert has become a veritable mind-body medicine guru. She's now on the staff of Deepak Chopra's Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine in San Diego, and has adopted some of his ayurvedic health practices, such as sesame oil rubdowns, which "have a very calming influence. I have one before heavy duty meetings." She has even tried guided visualization sessions uniquely tailored to her own expertise: she imagined a flood of beta-endorphins spurting out of her pituitary gland." I had very little trouble bringing the pituitary into sharp visual focus," she recalls, "and the beta-endorphin was there on my inner screen, all thirty-one of its amino acids strung together in a bead chain." When she visualized releasing the endorphins, she felt an instantaneous rush of bliss. Yet for all her mind-body wisdom, she's clearly worried at this dinner: about fundraising, the future of her research, the launching of her book, and a relapse into an old addiction. "I quit smoking on the stroke of midnight in 1970, but two months ago I started again. I'm not going to do it forever, but Michael's on the verge of leaving me over this. Are you, honey?"
A few weeks after our dinner I take the train down to Potomac to spend two days at her house, shopping with the scientist and her husband, cooking dinner together, observing them in the lab. It's an experience that is absolutely unnerving, for Pert rolls out her passions, obsessions, aspirations, and frailties as if she were a one-woman stage act, seeming to censor nothing. "I have a pathological desire to mother people," she announces spontaneously. "It's horrible if you're one of the men in my life." She sits a little too close, with a big smile. She urges me to stay longer so that we can go on a sailing trip, offering to lend me her daughter's old bathing suit. She tells me she had a crush on one of her cute postdocs earlier this year. She admits she suffered a major depression when she was in college, which she blames on a diet of peach pie that "blew out my thyroid." She bickers with her husband, and he bickers back, and the bickering sometimes has an uneasy intensity, perhaps born of their 24-hour-a-day partnership. Ruff himself was a postdoc a decade younger than Pert when—divorced with three children—she apparently took him under her wing, romantically, sexually, and scientifically. "We were at a party and he told me that it was his 30th birthday and that he wished he could go home with the sexiest woman at the party. I said, 'How about me?'" As Pert herself admits, "I say all kinds of things I shouldn't."
Yet when the subject turns to science, she shows a fluidity, passion, and ease of expression that is rare. As her ex-husband, Agu Pert, Chief of Behavioral Pharmacology at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), says, "Candace has a very fertile mind. Some of the things she's conjured up are really excellent, others are off the track, but she has a unique way of looking at things." Her attempt to stitch together fields as diverse as molecular biology, immunology, psychology, and alternative medicine is at the very least courageous, at best inspiring. No wonder she came to national attention when she was featured on Bill Moyers' landmark 1993 PBS series, Healing and the Mind. Critics, enchanted by Pert's ideas and enthusiasm, said she deserved her own series.
Scarlet Woman of Science
Healer wasn't a role Pert could have conceived of when, in her early twenties, she joined the already famous lab of Solomon Snyder, M.D., a neuropharmacologist and psychiatrist at The Johns Hopkins University. Neither did she imagine that she'd soon be involved in a bitter political rivalry with her mentor over America's most prestigious scientific award. She was newly married, with a toddler son and a husband finishing a deferred military obligation.
Snyder was a prodigy at 34, the youngest full professor at Hopkins and heir apparent to a stunning scientific lineage. Snyder's mentor, Julius Axelrod, was a Nobel laureate; Axelrod's mentor, Bernard Brodie, was widely considered the most important figure in modern drug research. "When 'Julie' won the Nobel we felt forever blessed." she recalls. "And we saw Sol as just short of God. Most labs are really dull, and people almost bask in the tedium of the research, but we were always at a fever pitch." Students called Snyder's office the "throne room," and already, recalls Pert, he was "jetting around the world to get the latest, hottest news from other labs."
Pert seemed driven by the same hubris and passion as her mentor. "The opiate receptor!" she writes, describing Snyder's decision to let her search for it. "To find a receptor for morphine, the drug over which wars had been fought, kingdoms lost, the mystical substance that suffused the writings of Coleridge and De Quincey, named in the honor of Morpheus, the god of dreams. Now here was a project worthy of my ambitions."
