Even the immune system may be a different kind of emotional brain. Pert's husband, Ruff, has theorized that special immune cells called macrophages may function like nomadic brain cells, because their receptors accommodate virtually every neuropeptide known. Perhaps the connection between emotions and health is more than folklore: it may indeed have a very precise scientific basis. "Could being in touch with our emotions facilitate the flow of the peptides that direct our immune system's natural killer cells?" she asks. Might that explain why women with breast cancer live longer when they participate in support groups?
In facing her own emotions, Pert says she has sometimes experienced a healing crisis. "One night I stayed up all night and prayed. I felt like I was going to die. It was as if I was re-experiencing every cough, ache, and pain I'd ever had as a kid. There's this unbelievable skepticism that scientists have. I don't have it anymore. People said the opiate receptor didn't exist. I saw it go from something people couldn't conceive of to something that was invoked to explain everything from orgasms to runner's high."
That optimism may be why she persists in her research on Peptide T and AIDS, which has gotten a frosty reception from her colleagues. Or perhaps it's the mystical experience she had in 1985, after Pert and Ruff decided to marry. They hiked up the famed Haleakala Crater on Maui. Returning in an exhausted and altered state of mind to a scientific conference on the island, Pert presented her findings on the AIDS virus, which she says looks like a Star Wars "sphere whose surface is covered by hundreds of sharp protein spikes." These spikes allow it to bind to cell receptors, including T4 receptors in the brain and certain immune cells. That may be the virus' entry point into the immune system and the brain—and if so, could explain how the virus causes dementia. If we could find the peptide for that receptor, she told scientists at that meeting, we might have a nontoxic therapy to prevent AIDS.
"And then I heard a male voice inside my head," she recalls. "It said, 'You'd better find it!'"
She did find Peptide T, but thus far its potential has not panned out. Pert believes the scientific community is still antagonistic toward the "scarlet woman of neuroscience." But, in looking back at the Lasker fracas, she would not have played the game differently. "I would not have been who I am, [the woman] who went on to meet Michael and think in a new way and try to merge neuroscience with immunology. I've run into obstacles, but it's kept me close to the bench, to real lab work. I used to be angry about it all, but somehow that pales in comparison to having the potential treatment for a devastating disease."
She also faults the scientific community for its rigidity. "There are turf battles. For instance, neurology 'owns' multiple sclerosis. It's considered a neurological disorder. So they've been working happily for 20 years on myelin (the protective coating of nerves), and they just keep barking up the same tree. And they're very upset that the disease might possibly be viral in origin. If you find infected cells they say, 'Well, that's very interesting, but what relevance does it have?' And they walk out of the room. Why? Because if multiple sclerosis turns out to be viral, suddenly infectious disease researchers will own it. The different fields just won't hold hands. So how can they have original ideas?"
A Fabulous Happy Ending?
But Pert, in marrying an immunologist, long ago broke with that tradition. At Georgetown, she and her department chairman, neuroendocrinologist Michael Lumpkin, are collaborating. They've found that AIDS wasting seems linked to a disruption of growth hormone, and possibly a disregulation in Peptide T.
Pert's view of Peptide T is romantic, even transcendentally mystical. "Whenever Peptide T research is at a pivotal point, it seems, meteorological weirdness strikes: ice storms, heat waves, hurricanes, earthquakes...and rainbows," she writes. "Michael and I call it 'Peptide T weather.'"
"Do you really believe that?" I ask as we drive toward her lab at Georgetown University in the late morning. "That Peptide T is holding so much energy and being blocked so strongly that it's actually disrupting the weather?"
"Yeah, something like that," she says, soberly. "There'd be a meeting on it at NIH and we'd have the biggest ice storm of the century. It got to where Mike and I would just laugh about it."
Peptide T, she hopes, may be the beginning of a whole new avenue of research as big as the opiate receptor. Viruses, triggers in so many diseases, from the common cold to cancer, may imitate peptides. Perhaps the most damaging viruses wreak havoc because they are able to bind to multiple receptors in the body. Peptides, then, may be more than the language of emotions, they may be a language that viruses have stolen and imitated. Think of viruses as peptides' evil twins.
"I think this is all going to have a fabulous, happy ending. Let's say Peptide T really does block the virus, and somebody inside the system shows that it works. Somebody else stands up and says, 'We got the same result she did.' Then it will explode." As she writes at the end of Molecules of Emotion, "I've come to believe that science, at its very core, is a spiritual endeavor. Some of my best insights have come to me through what I can only call a mystical process. It's like having God whisper in your ear, which is exactly what happened on Maui. It's this inner voice that scientists must come to trust."
