Candace Pert discovered the opioid receptor, created a drug to stop AIDS in the brain, and identified stress as a cause of disease.
She also inadvertently unleashed the overdose epidemic, got kicked out of the NIH, and was denied credit for much of her work.
Largely forgotten, Pert was a trailblazing yet mercurial neuroscientist.
Emmy award winning writer and producer Pamela Ryckman shines a light on Pert’s breakthroughs and her fascinating legacy on the podcast.
Dr. Phil Stieg: Today our guest is Pamela Ryckman, Emmy award-winning film producer, screenwriter, journalist, and business executive who has focused much of her career on both the achievements and struggles of women in the workforce.
We are here to discuss her most recent book, Candace Pert: Genius, Greed, and Madness in the World of Science, a biography of a visionary scientist whose cutting edge research, it could be said, led to both the discovery of the mind-body connection as well as the opioid crisis.
Pert faced many challenges during her career as a scientist in a male-dominated field. But perhaps the biggest obstacle was her own personal demons. The deeper we dig into her complicated and fascinating story, the more it reveals a darker side.
Pamela, thank you so much for being with us today.
Pamela Ryckman: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Phil Stieg: Tell me a little bit about Candace Pert. Why is she so famous?
Pamela Ryckman: She was a pistol. I mean, this is actually why her story has been so much fun to write. Candace was a renowned neuroscientist and pharmacologist who really stood at the dawn of three major revolutions, three movements in not only scientific, but also political history. The opioid crisis, number one, the AIDS crisis, number two, and the mind-body revolution. I joke around that she was like this Forrest Gump character because, in telling her story, everything she did was inextricable from major movements in American politics and history.
Phil Stieg: So let’s do a brief time capsule of Candace’s life. Give us a timeframe so that people can put her life and her brain, because this is about your brain, into perspective.
Pamela: Candace distinguished herself from a very early age. She just had this playful, mercurial mind. Everyone I talked to, her friends, her family, her colleagues, just delighted in that. And we can talk about sort of the link between that and hypomania and mental illness a little later. But she was always doing these wacky things and really pushing the limits. And I think her parents would look the other way because she was doing incredibly well in school, she was like their genius child. She got into every college that she applied to.
She was also highly sexual, very out there with her feminine wiles. And she got accidentally pregnant at age 19 by her first husband, Agu Pert. When there was a blackout, they had a wonderful time on the laboratory floor. Agu was a grad student at Bryn Mawr. She eventually attended Bryn Mawr, decided because Agu was a scientist, that she loved science, too. Ended up as an almost teen-mother, making it not only through college, but then applying to Johns Hopkins for her PhD.
This was not something that really women did at the time. She had an incredible amount of tenacity and fortitude. She felt like there was nothing she couldn’t do. And she would work for great, great stretches at a time with no sleep. Eventually, she was diagnosed with hypomania and bipolar disorder. But for stretches of seven to eight years at a time, she was remarkably fruitful.
Then when she went to Johns Hopkins, she had the great fortune to study under a rising star in the field. Solomon Snyder. Research science basically follows an apprenticeship model akin to sort of artists or architects. And so, Candace really, when joining Sol Snyder’s lab, she was receiving the keys to the kingdom. She was joining a lineage, a scientific lineage of Nobel Prize winners that really set her up for success.
Phil Stieg: So, there she is, a bipolar workaholic in a high-profile research lab. What happened next?
Pamela Ryckman: Candace quickly developed a reputation for being kind of sloppy in the lab. She wasn’t as diligent with the different steps. And so Sol initially assigned her for her PhD, a rather boring topic, sort of a sure thing. He was like, okay, I’m going to make sure that you get out of here alive and thrive to the best of my ability. But Candace, because she just had this incredible chutzpah, wanted to take on a project that would change the world. And in 1971, when Richard Nixon declared war on drugs, she saw an opportunity to do it.
Richard Nixon wanted to escalate bombing in Vietnam. But that was obviously a very unpopular war at this point. And so what was the best way for him to be able to pursue that international agenda? Well, by taking credit for something domestically.
Again, Candace’s story is so interwoven with major trends in American politics. So Richard Nixon thought we had an epidemic of opioid abuse in the 1970s, so he poured a whole bunch of money into curing addiction.
When Candace decided to pursue this as her graduate thesis, she did it thinking that she was taking the first step in eradicating heroin addiction. She never could have imagined the nightmare that she would set in motion.
Phil Stieg: Her goal then was to identify the opioid receptor in the brain in order to treat addiction by blocking that receptor.
Pamela Ryckman: What ended up happening was, after six months of failed attempts to try to find the opiate receptor, which is the mechanism by which opioids function in the brain, she couldn’t do it. So her mentor, Sol Snyder, pulled the plug. He said, forget know, we actually have to get you to a PhD. I’m sending you back to your old boring assay. So she snuck into the lab with her four year old son in tow. She actually illegally procured radioactive materials necessary to perform this assay that she had conceived of after her mentor pulled the plug, snuck into the lab, did it, and found the opiate receptor.
I mean, this was something that scientists now the world over were trying to do. And here’s this young woman who’s been told no, and she just went and did it anyway. Again, she could not have done it without her mentor’s help.
But then what happened is Sol – Sol went through the roof. He thought this was the best thing. I mean, it made him famous. He got unlimited grants. New students were flocking to his lab. He was going to position himself to win the Nobel Prize based on her work.
Phil Stieg: Didn’t this lead to a rather ironic result?
Pamela Ryckman: Three years after the opiate receptor was discovered, endorphins were discovered. Scientists reasoned, okay, our bodies wouldn’t have receptors just for exogenous drugs so that we could get high. What’s our internal high? And I didn’t realize before this that endorphins means endogenous morphine, our body’s internal high.
Some scientists at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland discovered endorphins. Pharmaceutical companies tried to manufacture non-addictive painkillers based on the structure of endorphins. Couldn’t do it. And when they realized they wouldn’t make a mint doing that, they basically set about creating much more potent analgesics that got people hooked.
Phil Stieg: Which led to the opiate addiction crisis we have today.
Pamela Ryckman: Yeah.
Phil Stieg: Following her lifeline from that initial incredible breakthrough linked with her unusual personality, she then later on goes to write the book Molecules of Emotion, which I suppose is somewhat autobiographical?
Pamela Ryckman: And it is very juicy. I read her memoir and was like, holy cow, this is like Hidden Figures meets A Beautiful Mind. I was wearing my producer hat when I read her memoir, thinking, oh, gosh, this is the story of a forgotten woman.
In the wake of the opiate discovery, what ended up happening is that Sol Snyder helped her and her first husband, Agu Pert, get these plumb jobs at the NIH. They were thriving. And one of the scientists on the University of Aberdeen team came to her, that they had all been positioned to win the Lasker Award, America’s highest scientific award, based on that discovery. And Candace at first didn’t believe it. She didn’t think Sol Snyder would cut her out. And she almost just put her head in the sand until she received an invitation from him to sit in the audience and cheer. The experiment on which he had pulled the plug, that she went and performed against his will to find the opiate receptor, he was taking all the credit for.
Her memoir really exposes the dirty side of science, what was going on, this sort of dog-eat-dog culture that he had cultivated in his lab. Some folks kind of likened her to Frankenstein’s monster, that she was his perfect lieutenant. He called her “my little girl.” She did his bidding, and she was tough on others, and stole other people’s work, but boy, she did not like that corruption when it affected her. And she went public.
Really became quite a firebrand and not very appreciated by the scientific establishment.
Phil Stieg: She’s clearly a genius. But can you explain to the audience a little bit about how, whether it was hypomania or bipolar, how that played into both her creativity but also the downside of her life?
Pamela Ryckman: Absolutely. But you know, part of what Candace did, she was just always very impulsive. And so whatever she thought at any given moment, I mean, she wouldn’t ever censor herself. So whatever she was thinking would just fly out of her mouth. And whatever she sort of felt like doing, she would do, and she could justify it in her mind. And she didn’t necessarily think through the logical consequences of her actions.
She just didn’t understand the rules. So she’s not constrained by what other people think of as the rules. But at the same time, when it comes to sort of working within large organizations, it made her sort of a pariah. She really made a lot of people angry for years afterward. And I think part of the reason that they didn’t want to hear what she had to say is because of the way she said it.
Interstitial theme music
Narrator: Candace Pert wasn’t the only woman in science to have credit for her work usurped by men. Many female scientists were denied the recognition that they deserved, with male colleagues hijacking the spotlight.
One famous example is Rosalind Franklin, the biochemist who discovered the double helix shape of DNA. In 1952, Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling captured an X-ray image that showed the first evidence of DNA’s double helix structure.
Scientists James Watson and Francis Crick were shown this image—and Franklin’s notes—without her knowledge. With Franklin’s data, they created a model of the DNA double helix. This earned them a Nobel Prize in 1962, but Franklin’s contribution was ignored.
Watson and Crick didn’t consider it necessary to acknowledge the work of a woman, according to Dr. Howard Markel, who described the snub in his book, The Secret of Life, and in an interview on PBS News Hour.
Howard Markel from PBS News Hour: I think they never thought of Rosalind as a serious competitor of their level. I think it was chauvinism to the nth degree, and was very common in academic science on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean at that time.
Narrator: Other women in science were similarly sidelined.
Chemist Alice Ball developed a treatment for leprosy, but two male scientists took credit for her work after she died in 1916. In 1958, geneticist Esther Lederberg attended the Nobel Prize ceremony as a guest, while her first husband and two other men, were honored for work connected to her own research.
In 1967, Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars—neutron stars that give off a radio pulse—when she was just 24 years old. In 1974, this discovery earned a Nobel in physics…but the prize went to two senior male scientists, one of whom was Bell’s supervisor.
Today, some women scientists are finally receiving their overdue recognition. The fame of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin will soon extend beyond Earth, when a European-built robotic rover bearing her name will search for the building blocks of life in a mission to Mars.
Interstitial closing music.
Phil Stieg: Describe some of the antics that you went into in the chapter on the crazies. She’s got to understand that this kind of behavior doesn’t endear her to the conservative scientific crowd of the National Institutes of Health.
Pamela Ryckman: Not in the least. She would sunbathe nude with colleagues around. At one point, she was at a scientific conference in Colorado, and she was not a good skier, but she was fearless. She always had a broken bone. She would take on anybody, elbow somebody out of the way, curse at everybody.
When she had her first venture backed company, her investors were these conservative Pittsburgh industrialists, and she broke into the phone system and left an outgoing message that said, “Hi, you’ve reached the porn system. For oral sex, press one. For missionary, press two.” She went on and on. Her investors thought that they had been victims of a security breach. And when they walked into the office, she burst out laughing. She’s like, “oh, voice porn? That was me. Ha. Ha Ha!”
Phil Stieg: Did they invest?
Pamela Ryckman: They already had. But it’s like, there’s no wonder that she says that her first company, it was called peptide design, became peptide demise within 15 months. And I think a large part of that is because she was doing these wacky, wacky things that actually, no matter how brilliant she was, made people not trust her and not think that she was just a loose cannon.
Phil Stieg: Clearly something was not functioning normally in her frontal lobes.
Pamela Ryckman: It really wasn’t. But again, and we haven’t covered this yet, but I think Candace’s greatest legacy in today’s world, is really the sort of the mind-body connection and the idea that stress causes disease.
In the 1980s, no one was thinking or saying that stress caused disease. And Candace was looking at psychiatrists and psychologists who were treating patients and basically prescribing medications with no regard for their effect on the body. And then meanwhile, you had physicians who were treating the body with no regard for its effect on the mind, or how our thoughts and emotions influenced our physiology.
So she was sort of the first person saying that body and mind are one. And if that’s the case, they need to be assessed and addressed holistically. And that was revolutionary at the time.
Phil Stieg: That’s what I wanted to get into next, was the whole concept of the mind-body connection. Freud used to say that there’s no new ideas, there’s just different ways of talking about them. And now if you open up Scientific American, it’s about the gut-brain connection when she was talking about it 40 years ago. So give us a little bit of her genius. How she got into this, and then how she kind of marketed the idea.
Pamela Ryckman: What Candace’s research showed is that the way we experience reality is constantly filtered through, and regulated by, our emotions. And much of these data go unprocessed by the brain, is what she was saying.
And now this feels like part of our vernacular-that the brain would filter out a multitude of sensory information that’s bombarding us every day. We can’t take it all in, because it’s absorbing only what it needs for survival.
She was looking at how this informed trauma. She had already had one psychotic break at that point, and her sister was bipolar, and her father had PTSD from World War II, but was also sort of diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her genius stemmed from a deep personal need to understand what was happening with her own brain and body, and try to help herself and her family members.
Phil Stieg: Aside from the mind-body is this whole other story about the Peptide T. Can you define what peptide T was and what it was supposed to do?
Pamela Ryckman: Peptide T was a drug that Candace Pert created at the National Institute of Mental Health. It was initially created to treat AIDS in the brain because AIDS patients were suffering from symptoms of dementia. But then she realized that it would also work on the body by basically blocking the receptor so that the disease couldn’t get in.
Phil Stieg: So tell us about Candace’s role in peptide T. What was the positive? And there’s plenty of negative there that you can go into as well.
Pamela Ryckman: Well, so what happened was, and again, this was another example of Candace believing that she had been touched by spirit in her work. Really believing that she had divined a solution to one of the most intractable problems facing society today.
To give you some context, similarly to the opioid crisis, the AIDS crisis was a political nightmare. As early as 1980, gay men were showing signs of mysterious illness, immune disorders, all sorts of complex symptoms that had never been seen before. And CDC scientists were monitoring this. However, obviously the nation was plagued by an entirely other disorder, which was prejudice and bias. And so HIV/AIDS was basically left to spread unabated for the better part of a decade, in part because also Reagan had slashed federal grants to academic and research institutions like the NIH.
NIH scientists saw there wasn’t any fame, there wasn’t any money, there wasn’t any power in curing what was then called gay cancer.
In 1985, she got a call from a fellow scientist at the National Cancer Institute because of her mind body work, and he “Huh. We are seeing these symptoms of dementia in AIDS patients.” At that point, they didn’t know whether AIDS could actually infect the brain. And so here, Candace, she sees a path forward, something only she alone can tackle.
Candace put all of her weight into solving this issue. The way she tells it, she was in Hawaii at a conference and basically got a download saying, in the same way, the opiate receptor, well, there had to be something the disease fits into a receptor. Like a lock and a key. Well, what if you could block the receptor so that the disease couldn’t get in in the first place? And that’s what she did with peptide T.
Phil Stieg: The virus couldn’t get into the receptor, I.E. the keyhole. Then it couldn’t get into the cell. And the secondary effects of the virus weren’t appreciated by the patient. Right?
Pamela Ryckman: Exactly.
Phil Stieg: What’s interesting is, I was a resident in the eighties and I was in Dallas, where there was a very large gay community, and we didn’t really understand why all these patients were coming in the emergency room. And they had large cysts in their brain from toxoplasmosis because they were immune compromised. And it was a very trying time in medicine because we were treating stuff, but we didn’t know how or why.
Pamela Ryckman: Yeah. So AZT was the only drug to treat AIDS on the market for more than four years. AZT had been a drug originally developed at the National Cancer Institute to treat chemo. So there were again, a lot of egos involved, because the Cancer Institute wanted to take credit for having created the first potential cure for AIDS, or treatment for AIDS, because there was money involved there, too. And there were many people working hand in glove with big pharma.
So Tony Fauci was a young administrator. At age 43, he was the youngest person promoted to head an institute at the NIH, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. And so he was fighting Bob Gallo over at the National Cancer Institute because they would share information, but then also ice each other out because both of them wanted the credit.
Once the Reagan administration started paying attention, and there was more money and power funneled into curing this disease, then suddenly it launched a land grab. Then it was a big fight among the science’s best and brightest, and particularly at the NIH. And Fauci was running the 19 member committee that decided which AIDS drugs would move forward to clinical trials. And when peptide T was rejected by that committee, Candace handily pointed out that a number of the members on that committee had created other drugs and had financial links to pharmaceutical companies that were developing those other drugs.
Phil Stieg: Conflicts of interest.
Pamela Ryckman: Conflicts of interest abounding. And again, this wasn’t, you know, Fauci is not public enemy number one. He and Candace knew each other decently well. They were both rising stars. But he was young and he was managing bigger egos and folks who were more powerful than he was at that time.
Phil Stieg: Tell us about that and how it actually led to her nearly being prosecuted by the federal government.
Pamela Ryckman: So, Candace became absolutely obsessed and believed that peptide T would work, would actually become a cure for AIDS. Not just AIDS in the brain, but AIDS overall. So there was actually a fair amount of ego there for her as well. I mean, there was a genuine desire to help people, but also she was going to prove that she was right, just like she was fighting against what she called “the body boys.”
So when Fauci sort of blocked the experiments that she wanted to do, she sent it to the Karolinska, because in Sweden they had different rules. And in fact, as she suspected, Leonard Wetterberg’s studies showed that peptide T and a number of metrics worked, and potentially worked better than AZT. They needed to do follow up studies, but it was all very promising. So she goes and flaps that research report on the desk of everybody at the NIH, and of course, people go nuts.
What is an American scientist doing going outside of our institution to another country? Everyone was furious.
Phil Stieg: And they were furious because she broke the rules, but was still trying to help humanity. I want to make that point.
Pamela Ryckman: Absolutely. This is the thing. Candace, she was such a complex person. So much of what she did was genuine and loving. And yet she was also, again, subject to the same extraordinary egotism that marked the leaders in her field.
Phil Stieg: So the desires for success are not gender specific.
Pamela Ryckman: They are not. And that was also a really interesting point to make, because a desire for success and ego is not gender specific.
But the ways that women, and women like Candace, particularly trailblazing women, were judged not on the outcome of their studies, or the outcome of their behavior, which could have been very positive for society, but by their intentions. The way she was judged and the way female leaders were judged, I think, was very different from the way men were judged. Because in a lot of ways, oh, he’s a guy, he has to be tough to succeed. He found a way around the man, and he sort of did it anyway. Well, that wasn’t the view. That’s not how Candace was received.
Phil Stieg: Nor women at that time, nor even women now.
Pamela Ryckman: Exactly. She was expected to be a good girl and follow the rules and just be grateful that she even had a seat at the table.
Phil Stieg: So the NIH bureaucrats shot down her work on peptide T. Then what happened?
Pamela Ryckman: So when that didn’t work, Candace and her second husband and partner, at that point, they ended up pairing up with AIDS activists and distributing peptide T on the underground.
What had happened is this clandestine network of what’s called ”buyers clubs,” like in the film Dallas, buyers clubs had grown up all across the nation, where desperate AIDS sufferers and their allies were finding drugs that had been either used experimentally in other nations or approved by other nations and illegally smuggling them into the US. Most AIDS sufferers were going to be dead before they even got to try anything. I mean, people were truly desperate.
And Candace, both out of compassion and also out of egotism, decided that she would start making her drug in the NIH lab on the NIH dime. She was using her lab to manufacture peptide T and distributing it on the underground. Not initially to make money, but to help people, but also to gain anecdotal evidence, which she hoped would support peptide T and also the backing of AIDS activists who were increasingly powerful and increasingly scary to folks like Tony Fauci. She wanted them rattling the cage on her behalf and on behalf of peptide T. Well, she was eventually found out and kicked out of the NIH.
Phil Stieg: Technically. It’s kind of illegal, right?
Pamela Ryckman: Yeah, it’s a little illegal for a federal government employee to be, again, “breaking bad” essentially. And again, this is when I say her story is a tragedy, but she is fun to live with. She’s been a pistol.
Phil Stieg: But why do you think that her name isn’t more commonly known? What happened?
Pamela Ryckman: Some of it has to do with her being a woman and the trajectory of her career, how she died in ignominy. Candace’s ideas forty years later, the things that she was saying and proving in her studies that were literally getting her laughed out of rooms, forty years later, are now absolutely baked into the foundation of the field. So much so that they’re no longer even linked to her name.
She wrote more than 200 research reports on peptides and on some variation of the mind-body link, and no one wanted to believe her.
Phil Stieg: Pamela, it has been an absolute pleasure getting to know you and talk with you about the complexity of Candace Pert.
Between the genius and the lack of impulse control, I think she demonstrates the diversity of one human’s mind. Thank you so much for sharing your insights into this individual. It’s been a delightful hour.
Pamela Ryckman: Thank you.