It’s a late summer night in Potomac, Maryland and I’m sitting 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, explains 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’s in her early fifties, with a short tangled mop of brown hair and a big, comfortable body, stares at the Yalp in her hands, as if a genie might explode out of 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 (Scribners), 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 41-year-old with light brown hair and glasses.  He yalps her message a few times. The gravelly voice is out of some late night noir film, with snatches of almost-words—eerily misplaced in this sprawling wooden house with its wraparound deck, pool and hot-tub out back.  She interprets:
    “What did you think, the books would never relax? See, I’m never going to relax.”
    Then she instructs me to try the Yalp, to say anything, but say it 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.  “It was the killer experiment of my dreams,” she recalls of the study that first proved that the brain is hardwired 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 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.  Nobody could beat it down or hold on to it.  It became totally interdisciplinary.”  A class of proteins known as peptides—of which opiates are one, serotonin another—were found to regulate our behavior, mood and health.
    Our bodies are literally studded with peptide receptors.  For Pert, that means that consciousness operates at the cellular level, with 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 immune system’s white blood cells, which boast 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 flows over 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” literally murmuring in her ear.  From the beginning, Pert has stood apart, an outspoken, iconoclastic female in the male bastion of science.

    “To think I’m being viewed as a healer—God forbid, a faith healer!” says Candace Pert when I first meet her and Michael Ruff at a restaurant in New York City, exhausted after a long day of trying to fundraise for their research on Peptide T, which they believe may help prevent the wasting and dementia caused by the AIDS virus.  It’s a project the couple has been working on for eleven years, but in spite of initial encouraging experiments, other scientists have not been able to replicate her early results.  “I’m a romantic,” she says.  “I believe it’s all going to work out.”  In fact, she speculates that peptides may eventually be the basis for a whole new generation of anti-viral 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.  Norepinephrine is the chemical that stimulates excitement, and the cold viruses uses the same receptors.”  When you’re happy, the virus can’t lock on to those 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 kind of 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 a sesame oil rubdown, which “has a very calming influence.  I do it before heavy duty meetings.”  She has even tried guided visualization sessions uniquely tailored to her own expertise: she imagines a flood of beta endorphins spurting out of her pituitary gland, a gland she’s seen in countless lab rats.  “I, of all people, had very little trouble bringing the pituitary into sharp visual focus,” she recalls, “and the beta endorphin was clear on my inner screen, all thirty-one of its amino acids strung together in a bead chain.”  When she released 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 to 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, and pick up some sneakers and jeans at K-mart.  She tells me she had a crush on one of her cute post-docs earlier this year, but now she’s over it.  She admits she had a nervous breakdown when she was young, although she blames it 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 post-doc a decade younger than Pert when—divorced with three children—she took him under her wing, romantically, sexually and scientifically.  “We were at a party and he told me it was his thirtieth birthday, and 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 National Institutes of Mental Health, 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 Moyer’s landmark 1993 PBS series, Healing and the Mind.  Critics said Pert deserved her own series.

    Healer wasn’t a role Pert could have conceived when, in her early twenties, she joined the already famous lab of Solomon Snyder, M.D., a neuropharmacologist and psychiatrist at 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 completing a degree at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.
    At 34, Snyder was a prodigy, the youngest full professor at Hopkins and heir apparent to a stunning scientific lineage.  Snyder’s mentor, Julius Axelrod, was a Nobel laureate; and Axelrod’s mentor, Bernard Brodie, was widely considered the most important figure in modern drug research.  “JULIE’S BOYS SKIM THE CREAM” had been written on the lab wall years ago; and, as Pert notes, these boys (along with one girl, Pert) formed a scientific dynasty: “When Julie won the Nobel Prize we all 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 in 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 and hottest news from labs.”
    Pert seemed driven by the same hubris and passion as her mentor.  “The opiate receptor!” she writes in her book, 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 Dequincy…named in the honor of Morpheus, the god of dreams.  Now here was a project worthy of my ambitions.”
    After months of failed experiments, Snyder finally took her off the opiate project—but Pert claims she disobeyed his orders, and ordered radioactive naloxone (a drug that blocks the effects of morphine) without his approval, completing one last experiment on a weekend in the lab while her toddler son played with vials and caps a few yards away.  Mother and child alone in the lab, she says she discovered the opiate receptor; and that the elated Snyder guided almost instant publication of the results in Science, and wrote the press release that alerted others to the breakthrough.  Others at the lab and around the world soon did equally important work on the receptor and on endorphins, yet later that year Pert was excluded from the Lasker Prize, known as the American Nobel.  Snyder and two other male scientists, John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz, won.  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 called Apprentice to Genius, by Robert Kanigel.  Pert refused to cooperate in Snyder’s nomination to the Nobel, and even accuses Snyder of nominating himself for the Nobel 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 that 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 of the discovery 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 Johns Hopkins University.  “The rules and regulations are too stringent”  Snyder says he guided Pert’s research, and had applied for an NIH grant to look for the opiate receptor using radioactive drugs a year earlier. As for nominating himself for a Nobel, “That’s absolutely not true,” says 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 like 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 the cure for AIDS in her back pocket, and explores the frontiers of alternative medicine and spirituality.  “I’ve earned myself a reputation as the bodymind scientist.  Somehow I’ve found myself able to straddle both worlds.”

    Pert first “came out” as a different kind of scientist in 1985, when she agreed to give the keynote address at a symposium for the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization that supports studies into consciousness.  There she talked about the mind-body connection.  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, in one single night of sleep our bodies produce more peptides than all the peptide chemists who have ever lived have manufactured since 1953.  Peptides provide our body’s most basic communication network.   In experiments at NIMH, Pert and colleagues took wafer thin slices of rat brains and, using radioactive molecules, mapped 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 organ that mediates memory, is the gateway into emotion.  Almost every variety of peptide receptor is found there, she notes.  The frontal cortex and another organ, the amygdala, are also densely populated with peptide receptors.
    However, the peptide network also reaches into all the organs, glands, spinal cord, and tissues of the body.  “This means,” says Pert, “that emotional memory is stored throughout the body.  And you can access emotional memory anywhere in the network.”  Emotions can range from anger to fear, sadness, joy, contentment, courage, pleasure, pain, hunger, awe, bliss.
Pert envisions emotions travelling up the body into the brain, where they are finally 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 was a result of emotional repression, and led to illness.  Breathing deeply—as recommended in yoga and meditation—may actually 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 cliché: the stomach is thickly laced with peptide receptors.
     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 be like nomadic brain cells, because their receptors accommodate virtually every neuropeptide known.  Perhaps the connection between emotions and health is more than folkore: 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 natural killer cells?” she speculates.  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…I had all kinds of feelings.  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, and I don’t have it anymore.  People said the opiate receptor didn’t exist.  We had no inkling.  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 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 in Maui, an eight mile vertical ascent.  Returning in an exhausted and perhaps altered state of mind to a scientific conference on the island, Pert presented her findings on the virus., which she says looks like something out of Star Wars, “a sphere whose surface is covered by hundreds of sharp protein spikes.”  These spikes allow it to bind to cell receptors, including one in the brain known as the T4 receptor.  That may be the virus’ entry point in the body 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 person 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 labwork.  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 twenty 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 m.s. turns out to be viral, well then, suddenly  Tony Faluci will be in charge of it, because he’s in charge of infectious diseases.  And they want to own M.S.  And the different fields just won’t hold hands.  So how can they have original ideas?”
    But Pert, in marrying an immunologist, long ago broke with that tradition.  At Georgetown, she and her department chairman, (Tk) Lumpkin, a neuroendocrinologist (someone who studies hormones’ impact on the nervous system) are collaborating.  They’ve found that AIDS wasting seems linked to a disruption of growth hormone, and that in turn may be linked to a disregulation in Peptide T.
    Her view of Peptide T is romantic, even transcendentally mystical.  “Michael and I call it Peptide T weather,” she writes in her book.  “Whenever Peptide T is at a pivotal point, it seems, meteorological weirdness strikes: ice storms, heat waves, hurricanes, earthquakes…and rainbows.”
    “Do you really believe that?” I ask as we drive toward her lab at Georgetown University in the late morning.  “You feel 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, somberly.  “There’d be a meeting on it at NIH and we’d have the biggest ice storm of the century.  It got to the point 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, which seem involved in so many diseases, from the common cold to cancer to autism, 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.  Not me, somebody else, stands up and says, We tried it, we got the same result.  Then everybody will go holy shit, and it will explode.
    “I’m a biological romantic.  I love science so much,” she says.  And, 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.”

Reprinted by permission of Sussex Publishers.