Presentation of the Wiener Gold Medal to Dr Candice Pert

Keywords: WOSC, Cybernetics, Awards

The World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics, meeting in the context of the World Congress of the Systems Sciences held in Toronto, 16-22 July, had the great pleasure of welcoming Dr Candice Pert on Tuesday 18 July to receive the Wiener Gold Medal.

 Plate 1 The President of WOSC, Professor Stafford Beer (right) and the Gold Medallist, Dr Pert

The President, Professor Stafford Beer (Plate 1), gave the following address:

I am so grateful to see such a large audience here this evening, given that the programme of this conference offers eight alternative meetings beginning at this very moment. Some years ago, in an exactly similar situation,I was hurrying to my chosen venue when I noticed an eminent statistician sitting alone on a chair looking disconsolate. I paused to ask him whether there was not a single meeting out of eight worth attending. He said: "That's not the problem. The problem is that I shall perforce miss seven excellent presentations, and in terms of standard deviations it seems to me that there is no significant difference between missing seven and missing eight. So I'm staying here". Congratulations to you all on overcoming any such blockage,and a hearty welcome from everyone to Candice Pert.

Some 25 years ago she discovered the opiate receptor. This is a site in the cell that can recongnize an opiate, typically a protein molecule, which is then anchored in the outer cell membrane to bind with substances such as neurotransmitters. There was confusion and disagreement at the time, as to whether the biochemical components even existed in the body naturally to create such outcomes.

The search to find the opiate receptor was one of dogged endurance reminiscent of the search for radium. Other scientists were searching too, but it was she who discovered a pair of amino acids constituting the critical peptide. This in itself was a discovery of major importance – significant people in the field expected Candice Pert to be awarded the Nobel Prize. The non-story of that, and of how the hardly less significant Lasker Award for medical research (often endorsed by a later Nobel Prize) was awarded to three men– men heavily underlined – will appall but not surprise egalitarian scientists, especially if they remember the shocking events surrounding Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the DNA molecule. You may read about all this in Candice's book, Molecules of Emotion, and very entertaining and exciting you will find it.

However, I do not expect a cybernetic conference to celebrate this discovery with particular enthusiasm. Please bear with me as I follow the peptide story a little further. All sorts of peptides were shortly discovered,and a whole new era was to begin. I suggest that we focus what was to happen on Candice Pert's own comments. Where abouts in the body would you expect to find opiate receptors? Obviously you would look in the brain itself – the hypothalamus perhaps. Alternatively you would look in the limbic system. But when she looked comprehensively for "her" perptides, she found them all over the place in the body. Think of finding concentrations of such peptides in the colon, as she did … so that's where "gut feelings" come from!

We move to early 1980s. The neuropeptides, it had reasonably been assumed, communicated across synapses in the nervous system. The assumption proved untenable. Many of the neuronal receptors were inches away from the neuropeptides: how were they communicating, if not across the synaptic gap? A co-worker called Miles Herkenham found that, counter to the assumption of people working in the neurosciences, less than two per cent of neuronal communication actually occurs at the synapse. This seems so absurd that for several years the result was ignored, and put down to errors of one sort or another. But Miles Herkenham was right all the time. He reckoned that the connection did not reside in the synapse brain cells, but was determinded by the specificity of the receptors. Candice Pert wrote: "the way in which peptides circulate through the body, finding their target receptors in regions far more distant than had ever previously been thought possible, made the brain communication system resemble the endocrine system, whose hormones can travel the length and breadth of our bodies. The brain is like a bag of hormones!"

At about this time, Francis Schmitt, who had originated the neuroscience research program at MIT, introduced the terminology of "information substances" to describe a variety of transmitters, hormones, factors, and protein ligands" – ligands are various small molecules that specifically bind to a cellular receptor, such as the opiate receptor, thereby transmitting an informational message to the cell. This was exactly the concept that Candice Pert needed to advance her own work, and she embraced it enthusiastically.

Now there are three classically separated areas of medical biology:

• neuroscience – dealing with the brain and central nervous system;

• endocrinology – dealing with the glands; and

• immunology – dealing with the spleen, bone marrow, and lymph nodes.

Each of these has developed independently of the others, and offers a classic case of the Hardening of the Categories to which my own writings complaining about reductionism in the systems sciences constantly refer. Explicity, throughout the 1950s, my attempts to incorporate the endocrine system into my neurophysiological brain model foundered on the rocks of disparate and incommensurable disciplines. So you will understand the excitement with which I received the discoveries that Molecules of Emotion unfolded. Instead of those three sciences, demarcated by their library shelves and dedicated journals, and instead of obediently following them into separate laboratories,we are presented with a unified system. It consists of a multidirectional network of communication, linked by informational carriers at the molecular level. It is surely delightful to contemplate the continuous molecular busy-ness that achieves wonders of intricate homeostasis – while quite indifferent to the pompous definitions of academe.

May I urge you to read the book. I do not have the effrontery to dissertate at greater length, thereby spoiling Candice's own account – and a thoroughly good read. But I must share with you a final insight that I met in the text with a squeal of joy. Candice explains that the unconscious mind of Freud in nothing other than the body itself – operating at the molecular level to integrate every aspect of the self. In fact, her discoveries are pointing to the kind of holistic emphasis on the unity of being that is familiar in eastern philosophy. I see her helping to cross that East-West divide –and that other chasm existing between science and philosophy.

Surely these are matters for high celebration. By the end of her book she is openly hypothesizing about connections not only between body and mind,but between body, mind, soul and spirit. Predictably, she will have a rough ride, as do all holists in a reductive world. I should like to wish her well in those endeavours, and that she continue with the same brave-heartedness with which she confronted so much prejudice in the past. Meanwhile, her scientific demonstration of the molecular reality of informational substances – the neuropeptides – in continual interaction between body and mind is the great cybernetic triumph acknowledged tonight.

I ascertained before I started that hardly anyone in this audience knew of Candice Pert, still less of the cybernetic triumph. How can this be?Surely it is because each of us here is pursuing the next step in the agenda s/he has elaborated within the confines of the paradigms that are already understood. This comment is not meant offensively. The research we are all doing, the development of the thinking we so far understand, are all worthy pursuits – the backbone of scientific advance indeed. But as system scientists, are we constantly in search of systemic invariance? We should be. Do we ever consider taking time off to review systemic advances in unfamiliar fields? We ought to. If not, we are tacitly accepting the established paradigms of system, tacitly resisting change and the hope of new visions. I doubt if anyone present actively wants to appear in that role.

I now call upon the Director General of the World Organization for Systems and Cybernetics, Professor Robert Vallee of Paris, to read out the citation (see Plate 2).

 Plate 2 Dr Candice Pert (left) and Professor Robert Valle¨e (Director-General of WOSC)

Professor Vallee read from the scroll as follows:

The Executive Council of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics has awarded the Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal to Dr Candice B. Pert in recognition of the relevance to cybernetic science of her seminal work in molecular biology considered as informational substances, and of providing pioneering scientific insights into a holistic view of the body-mind unity. Signed by the President on Tuesday eighteenth July 2000. [Signed] Stafford Beer.

The President then presented the medal to Dr Pert, who responded with a brief acknowledgement of thanks. However, she graciously agreed to join in an open discussion, and an enthralled audience remained in their seats until the President closed the proceedings an hour later than the advertised closing time.