After months of failed experiments, Snyder finally took her off the opiate project, but Pert claims she disobeyed his instructions and ordered radioactive naloxone (a drug that blocks the effects of morphine) without his knowledge, completing one last experiment over the weekend while her toddler son played with vials and caps a few yards away Pert contends that it was then, mother and child alone in the lab, that she discovered the opiate receptor, adding that the elated Snyder guided almost instant publication of the results in Science. Others at the lab and around the world soon did equally important work on the receptor and on endorphins.
Yet two years later Pert failed to receive the Lasker Prize, often called "the American Nobel," when it was awarded to Snyder and two other male scientists, John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz. Told "that's just how the game is played," the infuriated Pert believed she'd been cut out because she was a woman, and went straight to the scientific press, triggering a public scandal that eventually inspired a book, Robert Kanigel's Apprentice to Genius. Pert refused to cooperate in Snyder's nomination for the Nobel Prize, and even accuses Snyder of nominating himself by asking his department chairman to nominate him and then filling out the forms himself. To this day she believes he feels she cheated him out of the prize, and admits she was soon nicknamed "the scarlet woman of neuroscience."
It's a nickname that has stuck, especially since Snyder tells a radically different story (Harvard University Press published his version in a book called Brainstorming: The Science and Politics of Opiate Research): "First, no graduate student can order a radioactive substance on their own," says Snyder, now director of the department of neuroscience at Hopkins. "The regulations are too stringent." Snyder says he guided Pert's research, and had applied for an NIH grant a year earlier to look for the opiate receptor using radioactive drugs. As for nominating himself for a Nobel, "That's absolutely not true," insists Snyder, somewhat outraged. "Those nominations are carried out in great confidence."
For a long time, says Pert, "I was trying to make up with Sol. It was a major subplot of my life. When will Sol forgive me? When can we live happily ever after? Those days are over." Now, Pert plugs away at Peptide T, still convinced she may have a potent treatment for AIDS in her back pocket, and explores the frontiers of alternative medicine and spirituality. "I've earned myself a reputation as the body-mind scientist. Somehow I've found myself able to straddle both worlds."
"Bodymind" Molecules
Pert first "came out" as a different kind of scientist in 1985, when she spoke about the mind-body connection in a keynote address at a symposium for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization that supports studies into consciousness. A version of her talk was published in the Journal of Immunology, titled "Neuropeptides and Their Receptors: A Psychosomatic Network." It detailed her view of emotions and health.
According to Pert's talk, peptides provide our body's most basic communication network. To study the molecules' specific function, Pert and colleagues at NIMH began taking wafer thin slices of rat brains and, using radioactive molecules, mapping peptide receptors in the brain. Dense clusters appeared in parts of the brain long associated with emotion. According to Pert, the hippocampus, a small, almond-shaped structure that is crucial in memory, is the brain's emotional gateway. Almost every variety of peptide receptor is found there, she notes. The frontal cortex and another brain structure, the amygdala, are also densely populated with peptide receptors. Since emotions are regulated by neuropeptides, and the brain's memory centers are filled with receptors for these peptides, it's likely that emotion and memory are intertwined. However, the peptide network reaches into all the organs, glands, spinal cord, and tissues of the body.
"This means," says Pert, taking a huge theoretical leap, "that emotional memory is stored throughout the body." Emotions, ranging from anger to fear, sadness, joy, contentment, courage, pleasure, pain, awe, and bliss, engender a constellation of bodily changes, of which facial expressions are simply the most obvious. "And," concludes Pert, "you can access emotional memory anywhere in the network." How else, she speculates, could therapies based on massage, therapeutic touch, and chiropractic, trigger profound transformations? "Repressed emotions and memories might actually be stored in receptors throughout the body." In fact, says Pert, body and brain are not separate. "We are one bodymind."
Pert envisions emotions traveling in both directions, from the brain into the body, and up the body into the brain, where they are integrated and expressed. She has called herself a "molecular Reichian," after the theory of radical psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich, who believed that body "armoring" and muscular tension were a result of emotional repression, and led to illness. Breathing deeply—as recommended in yoga and meditation—may alter the flow of peptides. "There is a wealth of data showing that changes in the rate and depth of breathing produce changes in the kind of peptides that are released from the brain stem." "Gut feelings" may be more than a cliche: the stomach is thickly laced with peptide receptors.
