The Woman Behind One of Neuroscience’s Greatest Discoveries
In 1972, Candace Pert was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins, working in the lab of Solomon Snyder — a rising star in neuroscience and the youngest tenured professor at the university.
Scientists around the world were in a race to find the opioid receptor: the molecular site in the brain where morphine, heroin, and the body’s own natural painkillers attach. Finding it would explain, at the cellular level, how pain and pleasure actually work. Pert wanted to make it her doctoral thesis.
Snyder assigned her something else. Something safer, something more predictable — a project that would reliably get her to graduation.
She had been thinking about the opioid receptor problem since before she entered his lab. A year earlier, she had broken her back in a riding accident and spent time in a hospital bed attached to a morphine drip, wondering with genuine scientific curiosity how the drug was actually doing what it did. She read everything available. She developed a theory.
Most researchers trying to find the receptor were using opiates themselves as the detection tool. Pert noticed that opioid antagonists — drugs like naloxone that block opioid effects rather than producing them — bind to receptors more tightly than opiates do. If she used radioactive naloxone instead of radioactive morphine, the binding signal would be stronger and the receptor would be easier to find.
When she proposed this approach for her thesis, Snyder redirected her to the other project. After six months of pursuing the opioid receptor work anyway, without his full support, the results were not there. He told her to stop. He needed to get her to a PhD, he explained, and she should go back to the reliable assay.
She went into the lab after hours.
She brought her four-year-old son with her. Her husband, who worked at another lab, obtained the radioactive materials she needed. She ran the experiment herself, using radioactive naloxone, purified and applied to brain tissue.
It worked.
The naloxone adhered to specific sites on brain cell membranes. The opioid receptor had been found. When she showed Snyder the results, he recognized immediately what they had. The paper was published in Science in 1973 under the names C.B. Pert and S.H. Snyder — her name first.
The discovery opened an entirely new dimension of neuroscience. It made it possible to understand how drugs work at a molecular level, how the brain manages pain naturally, how addiction operates biologically. Snyder’s lab became the most sought-after placement in the field.
Five years later, in 1978, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research — one of the most prestigious honors in American science and a frequent precursor to the Nobel Prize. The award recognized discoveries related to opioid receptors and the body’s natural opioid compounds. It went to Solomon Snyder, John Hughes, and Hans Kosterlitz.
Candace Pert’s name was not in the announcement.
She received an invitation from Snyder to attend the ceremony as a member of the audience.
For a period, she had hoped he would insist on her inclusion. When the invitation arrived, she understood he would not.
She faced the choice that women in science have faced with dispiriting regularity: stay quiet and accept the situation, or speak up and accept the consequences of being labeled difficult, ungrateful, or a troublemaker.
She wrote a letter to Mary Lasker, the head of the foundation.
She explained that she had been Snyder’s graduate student and had played a central role in initiating and following through on the research. She pointed out that John Hughes — a junior scientist working in Kosterlitz’s lab — had been included in the award, and that her comparable role had not received the same recognition. She said explicitly what everyone in the room had understood without saying: part of why she had been excluded was that she was a woman.
The letter was not quiet. It caused a significant reaction in the scientific community. In January 1979, Science magazine published an article about the controversy, forcing a public conversation about the systematic practice of awarding credit to senior male scientists while junior researchers — particularly women — who had done the actual experimental work went unacknowledged.
The Lasker Award was not changed. Pert’s name was not added to it.
But the conversation it generated produced other consequences. The National Institute on Drug Abuse revised their own recognition to include Pert retroactively, with an official acknowledgment that her major contribution had been significantly overlooked. Other institutions began examining similar patterns.
Solomon Snyder eventually said publicly, years later, that Pert probably should have shared the Lasker Award and that she had been one of the most creative and innovative graduate students he had ever worked with.
Pert went on to become Chief of Brain Biochemistry at the National Institute of Mental Health — the only female section chief at that time. She published more than 250 scientific papers. She pioneered the field of psychoneuroimmunology, the study of connections between the nervous system and the immune system. She wrote books that reached audiences beyond the scientific community. She was called, by those who knew her work, the Goddess of Neuroscience.
Some in the establishment called her something less complimentary — a pariah who had challenged a system that preferred its hierarchies undisturbed.
Candace Pert died in September 2013 at sixty-seven. Her obituaries described her as the neuroscientist who discovered the opioid receptor. The Lasker Award citation still carries only Snyder’s name.
The pattern she named in her 1978 letter remains recognizable in science and in many other fields: the researcher who does the work, whose name appears first on the paper, who ran the experiment after hours with her small child in the lab — erased from the recognition when the recognition arrives, while the person whose name appeared second accepts the award.
She did not write that letter to win the prize. By the time she wrote it, she understood she was not going to win the prize. She wrote it because she had decided that what happened to her should not happen without being named, and because she was in a position to name it.
She forced the scientific establishment to confront, at least briefly, a truth it had been organized to avoid.
For those who have ever done the work and watched someone else receive the recognition — and faced the choice between silence and the complicated consequences of saying something: Candace Pert’s letter exists in the historical record as evidence that speaking clearly about what happened is itself a form of contribution.
Was there a moment in your professional or personal life when you received less credit than you deserved for something you actually did — and what did you do with that experience?
