The Most Important Female Scientist You've Never Heard Of
This is the most important female scientist you’ve never heard of. I know that phrase is overused, but this time it’s really true.
It’s time to tell the story of Dr. Candace Pert - otherwise known by her male peers as, “The Scarlet Woman of Neuroscience”.
Candace Pert was a renowned neuroscientist and pharmacologist, who stood at the epicenter of three major moments in world history - the opioid crisis, the AIDS crisis and integrative medicine. So. let’s step into my hot tub time machine and go back to when it all started.
It’s 1971 and President Richard Nixon just declared a war on drugs. The US was experiencing a heroin epidemic that was strangling the country, especially our soldiers. Post-war, 20% of soldiers that served in Vietnam were addicted to heroin and during the actual war, a staggering 50% of US Soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin to the point where their drug use was to blame for their increasingly monstrous acts overseas.
Back at home, Nixon was calculating a victory. He knew that if he could claim that he helped eradicate drug addiction, then he would all but guarantee his reelection. Unfortunately, this was all a long and expensive con.
At that time, the bane of Nixon’s existence were those against the Vietnam war and Black people. He knew he couldn’t make it illegal to be Black or opposed to the war, so he did the next best thing. He transformed his entire persona and thus presidency to be “anti-drug”
In his infamous June 17, 1971 speech, he labeled drugs as “public enemy number one”. In one fell swoop, Nixon got the American public to associate hippies with marijuana and Black people with heroin, after which he ruthlessly criminalized them to alienate those communities. The War on Drugs gave the country a permission slip to break in, raid, and imprison with dangerous wantonness.
Simultaneously, and for the first time ever in US history, the presidency poured a vast amount of money into scientific institutions in an unprecedented move.
Suddenly, the race was on.
The US government injected an unparalleled $84 million into the sciences to find a solution to combat drug use. With money comes funding for grants - so this unleashed the scientific floodgates and set the stage for a rat race among scientists across the nation to be the first one to find the mechanism by which opioids work in the brain.
At this point, we knew what opioids were but we had no idea how it worked on a biochemical level, so if a scientist could locate the opioid receptor, we could find a way to block that receptor and theoretically combat opioid addiction.
As this is happening, a young 26 year old named Candace Pert was a graduate student at John Hopkins University School of Medicine. She begged her lab PI and boss, Saul Snyder, the youngest tenured professor at Hopkins, to allow her to research the opioid receptor for her thesis.
He hand waived her away and actually used the words “listen little girl” it’s not happening and kept her working on the nondescript assay she was initially assigned to. But Candace, as you’ll come to know, was not the type to take no for an answer, even if it meant breaking the law.
She began sneaking into the lab after hours with illegally procured morphine, which her husband made for her after hours at the lab he worked at. This was what everyone else in the country was using in their shiny NIH funded research, so she would too. Not only was this morphine illegally procured it was also radioactive.
Radioactively tagging molecules allowed you to trace its pathway inside the body, so this was a doubly high risk substance she was bringing inside the lab, simply for the fact that it was a highly addictive substance plus radioactive.
Candace was trying to find opiate receptors by adding radioactively labeled morphine to brain cells, but the radioactive morphine experiments were unsuccessful.
So, she decided to go against the grain and switch from morphine to naloxone, which is an opioid antagonist, meaning it reverses the effects of opioids. It was thought that naloxone works by competing with opiates by binding to the same receptor in the brain. Furthermore, it was believed that naloxone and other opiate antagonists stay stuck to the receptor, unlike opiates, which bind less tightly.
Candace’s line of thinking was, perhaps the morphine isn’t staying on the opiate receptor in the brain long enough for me to trace it with the radioactive tag. I need to use a compound that will stay bound longer - and naloxone was that compound.
It was a bit of a Hail Mary, but Candace, in her eyes, had nothing to lose.
But that’s not all, Candace is not alone when she conducts these after hours experiments. She has her 4 year old son with her.
It was the first of many choices that made her a gray character in history, but also choices she had to make as a woman in the sciences - choices that her male counterparts never really had to ever make in their careers.
Finally, after many illegal lab nights, on October 22, 1972 - Candace Pert changes history forever.
“It was on October 22, 1972, and I have it in my lab notebook. I had been trying to find opiate receptors by adding radioactively labeled morphine to suspensions of membranes collected from brain cells. The drug is tagged with radioactive atoms so that you can detect its presence if it binds to receptor molecules on the brain cell membranes. At first, the experiments with radioactive morphine were unsuccessful. Then I switched to radioactive naloxone. Naloxone is an opiate antagonist, a drug that reverses the effects of opiates. It was thought that naloxone competes with opiates by binding to the same receptor molecules in the brain. And it was believed that naloxone and other opiate antagonists stay stuck to the receptor, unlike opiates, which bind less tightly. I said: "Oh, if this idea is right, I should be using an antagonist to find the opiate receptor." And so I obtained radioactive naloxone, purified it, and it worked. It stuck to receptors on the brain cell membranes. It was a "Eureka!" moment. And later, by adjusting the salt concentration in our experimental mixture, we showed that morphine binds to the same receptors.” - Candace Pert
Her boss, Saul, left her name off the research. An unfortunately all too familiar story for women in the world of science.
Saul Snyder went on to win the Lasker Award, which is America’s highest scientific honor. After this win, it wasn’t a great leap for Snyder to believe he could be in line to win the Nobel Prize, which he again, left Candace’s name off the application for.
But, Candace didn’t say a word, initially. It was an internal battle she struggled with that she wrote about in her book. Was she going to be another Rosalind Franklin?
The answer was a resounding no. So, Candace began writing letters to journalists about her critical role in discovering the opiate receptor. That was when she was branded as the ‘Scarlet Woman of Neuroscience’ for insisting that she get credit for her work. It was viewed as whiny, desperate and unbecoming of a lady.
Yet, her groundbreaking technique used to find the opiate receptor was universally used to discover receptors for all other neurotransmitters. Candace had single handedly created an entire field of research that is still used by pharmaceutical companies to this day.
They say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but Candace was a lightning rod for trouble. In fact, Candace was often in the eye of the storm for big moments in science.
First it was the opioid crisis and now it was the AIDS epidemic.
Although Candace’s third moment in science revolved around the mind body connection where she dove into her spiritual side, for the majority of her life she self identified as an atheist. Spirituality is like a four letter word in science. It’s oil and water - not to be mixed. Or so we’ve been told.
The truth is, so many scientists are spiritual and Candace began to have a change of heart when she created a treatment for HIV called Peptide T.
Peptide T came to Candace while on a hike in Hawaii. She didn’t know if she was dehydrated and delusional, but she described hearing a disembodied male voice guiding her to the answer. It was as if she channeled the solution and that was how Peptide T came to be.
Now, this might sound “off brand” for a scientist, where logic and evidence rule supreme, but history is full of divinely orchestrated moments that led to scientific strokes of genius.
For August Kekulé the structure of the benzene ring came to him in a dream. Frederik Banting had a dream about a diabetic dog that led him to discover that insulin is an effective treatment for diabetes. The structure of the atom came to Niels Bohr in a dream as well, he envisioned in his dream that atoms danced around the nucleus similar to the sun and the planets in our solar system.
Candace also shared a similar experience. She believed that if she could create a molecule that looked and was shaped like the AIDS virus, i.e. a mimetic, then this molecule could competitively bind to the cells that the AIDS virus was binding to and effectively block any AIDS virus from binding. With no place to go, the virus would eventually die out from not being able to replicate in the body.
What Candace was proposing was a possible cure for AIDS.
At this point, the Reagan administration injected a huge sum of money into the sciences to find a treatment for AIDS. Deja Vu?
History was repeating itself like with the opioid crisis under the Nixon administration.
This is when a certain Anthony Fauci entered the picture, or Tony Fauci as Candace knew him as.
Candace and Tony were contemporaries. They both won many of the same awards for best scientist, scientific research and so on. However, this was the Fauci before COVID made him a household name.
This Fauci was 43 years old and at 43, Tony Fauci was the youngest scientist to hold a top position at a scientific institute. He was in charge of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease and was running a 19 member committee that decided which AIDS drugs would move forward for clinical trials.
Fauci’s rival was Bob Gallo at the National Cancer Institute who was in charge of a similar committee over there. The stakes were so frightfully high. Money, fame and Nobel Prizes were on the table for the person and the institute who found a treatment or cure for AIDS. Many of these committee members also held financial interests in these different competing drugs. It was a bit of a mess to say the least.
A doctor was quoted saying that “three years were lost in developing AIDS treatments because of a stranglehold that these men had on the field.”
For all the above reasons, Candace’s Peptide T was being legitimately sabotaged by people at the NIH. Perhaps it wasn’t the drug they wanted to “win” the AIDS race and put up the red tape to slow down Peptide T’s progress. However, if there was even a 1% chance Peptide T could save lives, Candace was going to find a way to get the experimental drug to AIDS patients, even if it meant doing so illegally.
So, that is exactly what Candace did. She shipped Peptide T out to another country where the rules for approval were less strict than the US, so the drug could be to be used on a compassionate basis.
Within the US, Candace worked with AIDS activists in Act Up and distributed Peptide T for them to use. She wasn’t doing it for money, at least not initially. She wanted to know first and foremost if the drug worked and under what conditions.
If this story sounds familiar it’s because it became the basis for the movie, Dallas Buyer’s Club. However, the script got one aspect wrong. Matthew McConaughey’s character, Ron Woodruff, didn’t initially source Peptide T from Mexico, he was getting it directly from Candace Pert at the NIH.
But, of course, the NIH eventually found out what Candace was up to and she was in hot water once again.
This is where we come to the third and final act of this three part play.
After the AIDS epidemic, Cadence found herself yet again at the epicenter of a budding discipline - integrative medicine through the lens of the mind-body connection.
Candace, yet again, was breaking the scientific mold and integrated different parts of medicine to connect the dots of how each part of our body works in tandem, including our mind. For so long science was so heavily siloed into its own distinct niches, so much so that these different scientific disciplines were not communicating with one another. Candace dismantled that completely and brought forth the concept of integrative healing medicine - using science to explain spiritual concepts like the law of attraction, meditation, and mental healing - a completely new concept when Candace first put this out in 1997 in her book "Molecules of Emotion”.
Now is the time I reveal that Candace Pert had bipolar disorder. Her first episode occurred when Candace was a freshman in college. She was taken out of college for a semester and given electroshock therapy supplemented with thyroid hormones that did diddly squat.
For years at a time Candace lived in a hypomanic state. Now there’s enough science for us to know that sometimes these hypomanic states can be linked to flights of genius. And in Candace’s situation, that was clearly the case.
The realization that Candace’s commitment to neuroscience was a quest to understand herself and her own mind is profound. On top of that, the tragic irony is that her receptor research became the backbone to SSRI development and many other medications currently used to treat mental health disorders.
Candace Pert discovered the molecular and biochemical foundations of our emotions, but could not manage her own. She despised the drugs she was on to manage her bipolar disorder. She felt it dulled her creativity, her spark, so she stopped taking them. However, this was often what led her into self-inflicted quagmires of trouble.
At the end of the day, we are all drawn to the parts of this world that, in retrospect, are so deeply personal to who we are. Research is me-search as they say. We all just want to be understood, but no one wants to understand you more than you. To know oneself is to be free and for many of us that is a lifelong pursuit we will undertake. That pursuit will look different depending on person to person. For some it looks like therapy, for others it’s regular walks in nature, playing an instrument, taking medication, journaling. There is no right or wrong on the path to healing, only what feels good and right for you in the moment.
Candace dedicated her life to this pursuit and gifted the world with three strokes of genius as a side effect of her main quest of deciphering her own self.
Candace was not a black or white good or bad person. She sat squarely in the gray. She had her own internal battles mentally and emotionally, while also navigating being an incredibly bright female scientist in a man’s world. Candace was a bit of a Robin Hood in the science world, believing her sometimes questionable means justified the end of providing life saving science to those who needed it the most.
If you enjoyed Candace’s story so far, you can read her full biography that came out last year titled, Candace Pert: Genius, Greed, and Madness in the World of Science written by the fabulous Pamela Ryckman.
Paid subscribers also get to enjoy an exclusive video interview with Pamela who talks more about the book, how she even began this project and the MANY unexpected revelations along the way including the theory that Candace Pert was possibly murdered.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Today I Learned Science to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.