One of the great medical researchers of our time, Candace Pert combines razor-sharp logic, highly developed intuition, and a refreshing emotional openness that together enable her to embody the holistic, cross-disciplinary vision she advocates. Her bestselling book, Molecules of Emotion (Scribners, 1997, now in paperback) is noteworthy both as an insider's history of the changing scientific paradigm and as one woman’s journey of growth and understanding.
Pert was a graduate student in her mid-twenties when she discovered the opiate receptor, the cellular bonding site for endorphins, the body's natural painkillers, which she calls our "underlying mechanism for bliss and bonding." This breakthrough presaged a sea-change in scientific understanding of human internal communication systems, pointing the way toward the information-based model that is now supplanting the long-dominant structuralist viewpoint. Ironically, she achieved her eureka moment after having been ordered by her supervisor to stop her research, which he had concluded was a dead-end street. But in this and many other instances, once inspired, Pert is not easily dissuaded.
In the years since, Candace Pert has focused her research on developing non-toxic pharmaceuticals that selectively block receptor sites for the AIDS virus. She has also pursued the "threateningly interdisciplinary" relationship between the nervous and immune systems, developing documentation of a bodywide communication system mediated by peptide molecules and their receptors, which she perceives to be the biochemical basis of emotion and the potential key to many of the most challenging diseases of our time.
In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Pert discusses the two areas of research about which she is now most passionate: the possible role of vaccines in causing autism, and her work on Peptide T, which she believes may herald a major breakthrough in AIDS treatment. She also articulates her vision for the Institute for New Medicine, which she founded in affiliation with the Georgetown University School of Medicine to fund further research on alternative paradigm medicine.
Dr. Pert was awarded her Ph.D. in pharmacology, with distinction, in 1974, from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Previously, she had completed her undergraduate studies, in biology, cum laude, in 1970, at Bryn Mawr College. Dr. Pert conducted a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins from 1974-1975. After 1975, she held a variety of research positions with the National Institutes of Health, and until 1987, served as Chief of the Section on Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). She then founded and directed a private biotech laboratory. Dr. Pert currently holds a Research Professorship in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC.
Dr. Pert is an internationally recognized pharmacologist who has published over 250 scientific articles on peptides and their receptors and the role of these neuropeptides in the immune system. She has an international reputation in the field of neuropeptide and receptor pharmacology, and chemical neuroanatomy. She has lectured worldwide on these and other subjects, including her theories on emotions and mind-body communication. Dr. Pert holds a number of patents for modified peptides in the treatment of psoriasis, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, stroke and head trauma. One of these, Peptide T, is currently in a Phase II trial, in San Francisco, for the treatment of AIDS and neuroAIDS.
The Institute for New Medicine website can be accessed at www.tinm.org
For further information: