Candace B. Pert | Biography

Candace B. Pert is a leading researcher in the field of chemical receptors, places in the body where molecules of a drug or natural chemical fit like a key into a lock, thus stimulating or inhibiting various physiological or emotional effects. As a graduate student, Pert codiscovered the brain's opiate receptors, areas that fit painkilling substances such as morphine. Her work led to the discovery of endorphins, the naturally occurring substances manufactured in the brain that relieve pain and produce sensations of pleasure.

Candace Dorinda Bebe Pert was born in New York City on June 26, 1946, to Mildred and Robert Pert. She went to General Douglas MacArthur High School in Levittown, New York. She attended Hofstra University but dropped out in 1966. That year she married Agu Pert and the couple moved to Philadelphia so that her husband could get a doctorate at Bryn Mawr College. In 1966, Candace Pert gave birth to the first of the couple's three children.

In 1967, to help support the family, Pert took a job as a cocktail waitress. On one occasion she chatted with a customer who turned out be an assistant dean at Bryn Mawr. The dean encouraged Pert to finish her B.A. at Bryn Mawr, and helped her through the admissions process. In 1970, Pert got her B.A. in biology and that year entered the doctoral pharmacology program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Her first research assignment, working under Dr. Solomon Snyder, was to explore the mechanisms that regulate the production of acetylcholine, the body's most important neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that stimulate or inhibit other neurons throughout the body, which in turn regulate the heart and other organs. Then in the summer of 1972, again working with Dr. Snyder, she embarked on her next project, the search for an opiate receptor. Opiate receptors were believed to exist, but finding them was another matter. Although techniques for locating receptors of hormones had been put into practice, many scientists thought it would be difficult, if not impossible, to transfer the technique to an opiate receptor.

Makes Surprising Discovery of Opiate Receptors

Receptors evolve from a chain of amino-acid molecules; these molecules are shaped by electrical forces into a three-dimensional shape with an electrically active indentation which recognizes correspondingly shaped molecules. These indentations are the points at which a receptor binds with a chemical substance or neurotransmitter. Using technology borrowed from identifying insulin receptors, Pert used radioactive drugs to identify receptor molecules that bonded with morphine and other opiate drugs in animal brain cells. The first report on her finding was published in Science in March 1973. Pert went on to investigate whether opiate receptors developed before birth. She used pregnant rats to evaluate the brains of the fetuses and found that during fetal development opiate receptors were present.

Pert and her colleagues mulled over why opiate receptors existed. It was certainly not that animals had evolved opiate receptors to interact with poppy plants, the natural source of opium. The scientist speculated that there might be an unknown neurotransmitter, naturally produced in the body, that fulfilled a similar function. Other experiments had already shown that stimulating the brainstem of rats caused pain relief, and that the best pain relief was obtained when a specific part of the brain was stimulated. After initial investigations proved inconclusive Pert turned to other areas of research. Eventually two Scottish scientists, John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz, found the transmitters, which they called endorphins.

The discovery of endorphins led to the discovery of other types of receptors and corresponding chemicals in the brain. Uncovering the intricate system of chemicals changed the scientific conception of the brain as an organ that signals the rest of the body using just a few chemicals. Now it is understood that the nervous system uses many substances to signal pain, pleasure and emotions as well as sensory data. Many had mistakenly hoped that the discoveries would immediately result in a cure for drug addictions or a non-addicting pain killer for cancer patients, especially since the media had sensationalized these possibilities. Although these hopes proved overoptimistic, in 1978 Snyder, Hughes and Kosterlitz received the prestigious Lasker Award for their discoveries; Pert did not. The fact that the biochemist, who had received her Ph.D. in 1974, had not been recognized for her part in the discovery caused a controversy that even erupted on the editorial pages of the prominent journal Science.

Pert refused to become involved in any controversy, however, and continued on at Hopkins as a National Institutes of Health fellow from 1974 to 1975, as a staff fellow from 1975 to 1977, a senior staff fellow from 1977 to 1978, and then as research pharmacologist from 1978 to 1982. In 1982, she became chief of the section on brain chemistry at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). There, the neuroscientist turned her attention to Valium receptors in the brain and the receptors where the street drug PCP, or "angel dust," takes hold. In 1986, Pert led the NIMH team that discovered peptide T. Peptides are substances that are synthesized from amino acids and are intermediate in molecular weight and chemical properties between amino acids and proteins, and have been linked to the manifestation of emotions.

Pert left NIMH in 1987 and worked for laboratories in the private sector. She also started her own company, Peptide Design, to encourage research on peptides. The company was in existence from 1987 to 1990. Since then, Pert has become an adjunct professor in the department of physiology at Georgetown University. Among her other areas of research have been investigations into the immune system and the nature of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. Pert won the Arthur S. Fleming Award in 1979. She is a member of the American Society of Pharmacologists and Experimental Therapeutics; the American Society of Biological Chemists; the Society of Neuroscientists; and the International Narcotics Research Conference.

Since her first discovery of an opiate receptor, Pert has located endorphin receptors throughout the body, even in the pituitary gland. She suspects that the location of receptors in sites where there is no clear connection with conscious pain serves the function of signalling the central nervous system when there is a problem with an organ. She believes, as she told an Omni interviewer, that scientists will eventually be able to chart the various receptors of the brain and the reactions they produce. "There's no doubt in my mind that one day--and I don't think that day is all that far away--we'll be able to make a color-coded map of the brain. A color-coded wiring diagram, with blue for one neurochemical, red for another, and so on--that's the neuroscientist's ambition."