Dr Susan Jamieson interviews Candace Pert, an internationally recognized pharmacologist with considerable expertise in peptides and their receptors, the role of these neuropeptides in the immune system and on emotions and mind-body communication.
Sitting having breakfast midmorning in the coffee shop of the Albuquerque Hilton, I felt increasingly excited at the prospect of interviewing Candace Pert. She’d been a personal heroine ever since I’d read her wonderful book “The Molecules Of Emotion”, based on her research as a physiologist working at the National Institute of Health in Washington.
Her work had proven, in no uncertain terms, how every thought and emotion we have affects our physical bodies. To me this was the most significant work in the past century, on a par with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity! She had described vividly how exciting it had been to work as a research scientist with her (now) husband, Michael Ruff, discovering more and more about ‘peptides’ and their workings all around the body. Amidst the tense, backbiting environment of competing scientist all jostling for position to be first in line for major prizes, such as the Nobel, her team discovered that these peptides were informational substances constantly flowing through our brains and bodies, causing our feelings and emotions.
A lady in colorful clothes carrying a laptop walked in the door and I knew it was her! She was preparing her powerpoint presentation for the 4th International Conference on Consciousness.
I told her how excited I’d been when I read her book, and realized the implications for doctors. Even though this work was done in the eighties it seems that only now is this knowledge beginning to filter through to health practitioners. These information substances are mostly proteins: these may be familiar, such as valium, morphine and serotonin, the neurotransmitter beloved of prozac-takers!
Everyone knows that these affect our moods, however not everyone knows that the body naturally produces all of these substances, and that for them to work they must latch onto a receptor, like a key in a lock. Also, they don’t just work in the brain but all over the body! Actually, 95% of serotonin receptors are in the intestine! Think of all those expressions, ‘gut feeling’, and ‘the thought makes me sick to my stomach’.
Doctors as a group are just beginning to recognize the importance of boosting the immune system in fighting illness, something alternative healers have always focused on. After all, the immune system selectively targets and disposes of cancer cells and viruses all day long in a healthy body. Guess what – the highest concentration of receptors for informational substances are in our spleen, thymus, bone marrow and even on white blood cells. Are we beginning to see a connection between our emotions, such as stress or anger, and our health?
We’ve long known that viruses such as herpes and chickenpox reside in the dorsal root ganglia of our spines, to emerge as an outbreak of shingles when we’re stressed and tired. Candace showed that both a flu virus and serotonin share the same receptor. It’s easy to form an image of the flu virus being unable to enter the cell if we’re flooded with ‘happy hormones’!
MEMORY
During her lecture, with a few hundred people eagerly hanging onto every word, Candace broached a related topic, state dependant recall. It’s known that we cannot form a new memory without using the hippocampus area of the brain – also a hotspot for informational substances.
For example we may learn something under the influence of a drug – to our bodies this might be a food substance, caffeine or any other article ingested. The cells won’t discriminate between mood altering drugs and having actual emotions. On a chemical level they’re all part and parcel of the same thing: a specific key which fits in the keyhole of our memory banks to unlock them. Whatever we learn when affected by the drug or emotion we’ll be able to recall better if under the same influence.
As our lecturer points out, ‘emotions helped us remember. The cavewoman who could remember in which cave lived the gentle guy who gave her food is more likely to be our foremother than the cavewoman who confused it with the lair of the killer bear. The emotions of love and fear would secure her memories’.
HIV WORK
After her lecture, relaxing in a sunny courtyard in the dry, high attitude air of New Mexico, Candace doesn’t want to dwell on her work of the past. To me, it’s incredibly interesting, and also a confirmation of Freud’s theories about repressed traumas being caused by overwhelming emotion being stored in the body.
However, she’d rather discuss her newer HIV work. This is based on the same lock and key receptor model: to invade our cells the HIV virus has to fit onto the correct receptor, and she’s developed a drug, completely non-toxic, that prevents the HIV virus doing this and then entering the cell. She tells me that the reason why some people never get AIDS is that 1% of the population do not have the correct receptor to allow the virus invasion. This is called the CCRS receptor, and is where her drug, Peptide T gets to work.
Apart from stopping the virus entering cells, it also clears out any HIV reservoir inside the cell. In trials, after six months of twice-daily nasal spray, no virus could be isolated from the body.
Frustratingly, she developed this treatment in the 80s. However at that time the scientific world simply couldn’t understand how it could work as it was so ahead of its time, and it got put as the back burner. Now she’s making efforts with drug companies to revive interest.
This is her passion: she’s finally seeing how her receptor work can be accepted by and make a huge difference to the world! Her work now moving on from the esoteric world of feelings and consciousness to paving the way for a drug that could save millions of lives!