AR14 - TAKING FEELINGS TO THE MOLECULAR LEVEL By Cynthia Gage

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	TAKING FEELINGS TO THE MOLECULAR LEVEL by Cynthia Gage
Index of Issue 14

Science, asserts Dr. Candace B. Pert, is feminine. It's a conclusion she has reached after spending 25 years of rigorous, exacting research at the lab bench, forging her way to the top of a profession long dominated by men and the male perspective. Now, as Research Professor in the Department of Biophysics and Physiology at Georgetown University School of Medicine, she is considered one of the most pre-eminent neuroscientists in the world.

Featured on PBS 1993 series Healing and the Mind, the former chief of brain biochemistry at the National Institutes of Health is quickly gaining a reputation for combining logic and intuition, heart and mind to come up with solutions that have stymied science for decades. Because science has emphasized the mind for so long, Pert has focused on the heart. During her thirteen years at the NIH, she demonstrated and mapped biochemicals she has come to call physiological correlates of emotion or messenger molecules that mediate between the mind and the body.

Her work fuses molecular biology, immunology, psychology and alternative medicine. According to Pert, the heart of science is the assay, a definitive procedure which gives scientists the ability to measure. Before you can ask any serious questions, you have to be able to give a numerical value to the chemicals in each of your samples. And all measurement, according to Dr. Deepak Chopra, is defined by the idea of mother. Metra, a Greek word that originally meant uterus, gives birth to words like meter, matter, matriculation material substance itself. Chopra, who includes Pert on staff at his San Diego-based Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine, states, Her pioneering research has demonstrated how our internal chemicals, the neuropeptides and their receptors, are the actual biological underpinnings of our awareness, validating what Eastern philosophers, shamans, rishis and alternative practitioners have known and practiced for centuries.

It may be no coincidence that Pert, a mother at twenty, made her first breakthrough discovery while alone in the lab with her child. Taken off the search for the brain's opiate receptor, she put in a final day's work, then battled busy freeways to pick up her son at daycare before heading back to the lab to follow a hunch that keen intuition told her would pay off. In what she now remembers as the killer experiment of my life, she found the opiate receptor, proving that the brain is hard-wired to respond to the body's internal morphine.

As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Pert laid the foundation for the discovery of endorphins, the body's natural pain suppressers (and ecstasy inducers) she had personally experienced while recuperating from a horseback-riding accident at the beginning of her career. And after the medicated hospital birth of her first son, Evan, she chose natural birth experiences with her daughter, Vanessa, and second son, Brandon. I decided to trust the ability of my body to produce the drugs I needed to give birth naturally, she states.

An incredible curiosity was the only clue that Candace Beebe, the eldest of three daughters born to a Russian Jewish mother and a Connecticut Yankee father would one day become a world-famous neuroscientist. Grow-ing up in Wantaw, Long Island, Pert claims her childhood was fairly boring, but acknowledges the effect the very different emotional expressions her multicultural parents brought to the family had on her, perhaps providing a fractal wave for the emphasis she would place on emotions in her life's work. They were brought together during World War II, says Pert, pointing out that such a phenomenon allowed new genes to be expressed through people who otherwise would never have met. It was a time when there was little encouragement for women, she remembers. Even though I excelled, I wasn't encouraged. It was her ex-husband, Agu Pert, who coaxed her into springboarding a degree in biology from Bryn Mawr into a scientific career. We were another example of the new gene expression' born of World War II, laughs Pert. I think we have the only one-quarter Jewish, one-quarter WASP, one-half Estonian children in the world!

When I began, says Pert, a receptor was mostly an idea, a hypothetical site believed to be located somewhere in the cells of all living things... We now know, she continues, that the receptor is a single molecule, perhaps the most elegant, rare, and complicated kind there is. (A molecule, if you remember your chemistry, is the tiniest possible piece of a substance that can still be identified as that substance).

Receptors function as scanners, cellular counterparts to our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, fingers, and skin. As flexible protein molecules, they wiggle, shimmy, and even hum as they bend and change from one shape to another, responding to messages carried by other vibrating little creatures, also made of amino acids which diffuse through the fluids surrounding each cell. These chemical creatures, called ligands, dock onto the receptors, tickling them into rearranging themselves and allowing information to enter the cell. Though most scientists use the image of a lock and key to describe this process, Pert prefers the analogy of two voices ligand and receptor striking the same note and producing a vibration that rings a doorbell to gain entrance to the cell. In short, explains Pert, the activities of the cell are determined by which receptors are on its surface and whether those receptors are occupied by ligands or not. If the cell is the engine that drives all life, then the receptors are the buttons on the control panel and the ligand is the finger pushing the button.

Ligands, explains Pert, are divided into three chemical types: neurotransmitters, steroids and peptides, a tiny class of proteins that regulate our behavior, mood, and health. Comprising nearly 95% of all ligands, peptides provide our body's most basic communication network, literally constituting a second nervous system that links the brain to the body. The image is of a mobile brain one that moves throughout our entire body, not just in the head-located in all places at once, with each cell a holographic universe of complete intelligence.

Receptor science has given rise to nontoxic peptide drugs, with exciting potentials in the treatment of cancer, AIDS and other autoimmune diseases. Pert and her husband, immunologist Michael Ruff, have been working for more than a decade to develop Peptide T (named for its dominant amino acid, threonine), which showed positive results in initial testing on AIDS patients. It's an endeavor they foresee opening an avenue of research as big as the opiate receptor was.

Viruses may imitate peptides the most damaging viruses wreak havoc because they are able to bind to multiple receptors in the body. Peptides may be a language' that viruses have stolen and imitated. For example, the AIDS virus attaches to a receptor on T4 immune cells, preventing them from receiving peptides necessary to the health of our entire system.

Working with neuroendocrinologist Michael Lumpkin at Georgetown, Pert has found that the wasting syndrome associated with AIDS dementia seems linked to a disruption of growth hormone and perhaps a disregulation in Peptide T. Ruff theorizes that since macrophages of the immune system contain receptors for virtually all of the 88 known peptides, they may function like nomadic brain cells. This hypothesis piques Pert's creative curiosity: Could being in touch with our emotions facilitate the flow of peptides that direct our immune system's natural killer cells? she wonders, noting that she never catches cold during ski season. The common cold virus uses the receptor for norepinephrine, thought to flow during happy states of mind. When you're happy, perhaps the virus is blocked from entering the cell because the norepinephrine is blocking all the potential virus receptors.

Though emotions have been taboo in scientific circles, there is a strong but little known precedent for their inclusion. No less an established authority than Charles Darwin considered emotions a pivotal force in evolution. In his book Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he speculates that emotions are the key to the survival of the fittest! Since peptides are particularly dense in the hippocampus, a small almond-shaped structure that is the brain's emotional gateway and a center for memory, and since the body is filled with peptides in every organ, gland, and tissue and in the spinal cord, Pert concludes that emotions may be stored or remembered everywhere in the body.

Though self-described as very competitive (I'm one of the few people I know who has to beat her kids at games, she laughs), Pert's alternative viewpoint is not focused competitively against the medical establishment. I still consider myself a mainstream scientist, and this more holistic approach complements the reductionist view, expanding rather than replacing it, she says. Audiences to whom she speaks, however, are quick to express a growing outrage at the present health-care system. It's obvious the public is catching on to the fact that they're the ones paying monstrous health care bills for often worthless procedures to remedy conditions that could have been prevented in the first place, she notes. Pert wants to bridge the research gap she sees between hard science and alternative therapies, a role she has embraced through her involvement with the newly established Office of Alternative Medicine, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, which has a meager token budget one tenth of one percent of that allotted the NIH.

Pert has a growing interest in environmental medicine, having seen under the microscope alarming changes that have occurred in recent years. Cellular levels of heavy metals and dioxins from herbicides and pesticides are 300 to 400 times greater than they were when first measured, she warns, noting that environmental pollutants can enter the cell membrane and change the shape of the receptor, making it looser and sloppier. Pollutants suspended in cell membranes affect the electron flow through cell membrane gradients (which is how our cells transfer energy), causing energy starvation that gives rise to conditions like chronic fatigue, allergies, and chemical environmental illnesses. And it's not just the external environment that poses potential problems Pert considers sugar to be a drug. Relying on an artificial form of glucose to give us a quick pick-me-up is analogous to, if not as dangerous as, shooting heroin.

She has recently authored a book, Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel, which documents her career and the challenges she faced within a sexist scientific establishment. Excellent writer Pert's descriptions of scientific procedures are entertaining as well as illuminating. Describing government agencies' attempts to make nearly every possible peptide permutation, she jokes, Their chance of success was analogous to throwing 100 monkeys and 100 typewriters up into the air and waiting to see if, eventually, the complete works of Shakespeare would appear, printed out perfectly to the letter.

An indomitable spirit and a sense of humor have been hallmarks in the life and career of a woman who painted her fingernails with tiny rainbows and loved sitting at my lab bench, day in and day out, pipetting my chemicals and wearing my crisp, white lab coat. Her passion for her work is an extension of a passion for life, which she seems to enjoy in gulps. Admittedly flirtatious, Pert describes the presence of a particularly handsome researcher at her bench as being absolutely erotic;" her penchant for hiring Italian post-doctoral assistants was due, in part, to their passion and zest for life as well as for research. Her personal life has had dramatic ups and downs; a divorce from Agu Pert after a lengthy marriage left her in a serious depression before she met Ruff, nearly 10 years her junior, whom she soon married. As life and professional partners, the Pert-Ruff relationship is often stressful, but solid.

At fifty-something, the intense, competitive personality that helped lead her to the pinnacle of her profession is mellowing. She practices transcendental meditation religiously and has introduced herself to yoga (after two sessions, my feet stopped hurting and my whole posture changed). Additionally, she has opened herself to many forms of bodywork and enjoys regular massage. It's hard for me to focus on my own bodymind, she admits, but when I do, everything else seems to fall into place. If everyone would do yoga and have a massage once a week, we would save billions in health care costs!

In addition to a comprehensive alternative resource list contained in the back of her book, Pert describes a picture of the healthy, whole and conscious lifestyle she says is essential in achieving and maintaining optimal health. She advocates the usual diet, exercise, and stress moderation and adds what she feels is a non negotiable component: What's missing for most of us is a focus on daily emotional self-care. The emotions are a key to self-care because they allow us to enter into the bodymind's conversation. When your emotions are moving and your chemicals flowing, you will experience feelings of freedom, hopefulness and joy, she says. The goal is to keep information flowing, feedback systems working and natural balance maintained, all of which we can help to achieve by a conscious decision to enter into the bodymind's conversation. Pert believes that paying attention to our dreams will facilitate fluency in body language.

After a quarter century of doing her best to be Supermom, Superscientist, and Superwoman, Candace Pert may have mellowed, but she isn't about to rest on her laurels. Inspired by her discovery of a physiological bodymind, she is eager to continue serving both the scientific and alternative health communities. As Dr. Christiane Northrup, herself a skilled medical professional, says, The Goddess of Neuroscience is alive and well and willing to teach all of us the scientific basis for health and happiness.

Pert sees herself first and foremost as a truth seeker. My intention, she states, is to provide an understanding of the metaphors that express a new paradigm, one that captures how inextricably united the body and the mind really are, and the role the emotions play in health and disease...I feel like I've been chosen for some really important job on the planet and I don't need to be nervous about it; it's unfolding the way it's supposed to.