Candace Pert: She Found the Receptor, He Got the Prize

Posted by by Female Obscura

She found the brain’s opiate receptor as a graduate student in 1972. The prize that grew out of it named her professor and left her off.

In the fall of 1972, a graduate student ran the experiment that showed the human brain has a specific site where opiates lock on. It was the finding that opened the door to endorphins and to the modern chemistry of pain and addiction. She is the first author on the paper that announced it.

Six years later the field’s most prestigious American prize, the one often called a forerunner to the Nobel, was given for that line of work. It went to three men. One of them was the professor whose laboratory she had worked in. Her name was not on the citation.

Her name was Candace Pert.

The receptor

Pert was born in Manhattan on June 26, 1946, took her biology degree at Bryn Mawr in 1970, and entered the pharmacology program at Johns Hopkins, where she joined the laboratory of Solomon Snyder. She later said the problem had caught her before she ever arrived. Laid up with a broken back and treated with morphine, she had read a discussion of the unsolved question of how opiates act on the brain, and she carried it into the lab with her.

The question was whether the brain contained a receptor, a molecular lock that opiate drugs fit. In October 1972 Pert demonstrated it. The result was published in Science in 1973 as “Opiate receptor: demonstration in nervous tissue,” with Pert as first author and Snyder as second. It was the anchor of a wave of discovery. Within a few years came the enkephalins, the body’s own opiate-like compounds, and a new map of how the brain manages pain and reward.

The prize

In 1978 the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award was given to John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz, who had identified the enkephalins in Aberdeen, and to Solomon Snyder, for the opiate receptor work. Pert, by then a research scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, was not named.

She did not let it pass quietly. She wrote to Mary Lasker, who ran the foundation behind the award, and she refused to attend the luncheon where the prizes were given. Her letter is on the record. “I was angry and upset to be excluded from this year’s Award,” she wrote. “As Dr. Snyder’s graduate student, I played a key role in initiating this research and following it up.” What stung most, she said, was that Hughes had been included. He had worked under Kosterlitz much as she had worked under Snyder, and he was named while she was not.

The controversy reached the pages of Science in 1979. Colleagues at NIMH said she had been unfairly passed over. Ellen Silbergeld of the National Institutes of Health wrote to the journal that when the excluded scientist is young and a woman, it is hard not to see a pattern that is discriminatory in effect whether or not anyone intended it.

What the record shows, and what it does not

The archive does not overclaim, so two things have to be said plainly.

First, this is not a stolen Nobel or a hidden result. Snyder did not erase her. In his own acceptance he named her, saying that his special thanks went to Candace Pert, who as a graduate student had identified the opiate receptors in his laboratory. He told Science that it would have been appropriate for her to share the award, and he telephoned members of the Lasker jury to ask that she be added. They refused.

Second, Pert and Snyder did not agree on who had driven the discovery. Pert said the idea was hers before she joined the lab. Snyder said he had written a protocol for finding the receptor into a grant application more than a year before she arrived. Both accounts are in the 1979 Science report, and the archive leaves them side by side rather than picking the flattering one.

What is not in dispute is the mechanism that produced the omission. The jury treated the graduate student who did the bench work as a pair of hands rather than a mind. The people who do the actual experiments, when they are students, are routinely left off the honors that follow, and the student in this case was a woman. The Lasker matters because it is a marker. Twenty-eight of its recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes. To be left off it is to be left out of the line that leads to the highest recognition science gives.

After

Pert stayed in science and kept working, on the receptors and then on the peptides that act on them, and later on the connections between those molecules and emotion. She published more than two hundred and fifty papers, held patents, and wrote a 1997 book, Molecules of Emotion, that told this story among others and described the gamesmanship and the quiet appropriation of results as part of how the work actually gets done. She died in Potomac, Maryland, on September 12, 2013.

She found the lock the whole field was looking for, and she did it before she had the degree that would have made her a name the jury felt it had to count. The archive counts her. Enter the archive.

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