Peter Agre
Peter Agre is a Nobel Laureate American physician, molecular biologist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute. In 2003, Agre and Roderick MacKinnon shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes." Agre was recognized for his discovery of aquaporin water channels. Aquaporins are water-channel proteins that move water molecules through the cell membrane. In 2009, Agre was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and became active in science diplomacy.
Biography
Agre was born in Northfield, Minnesota and is the second of six children to parents of Norwegian and Swedish descent. Agre is a Lutheran. Fascinated by international travel after a high school camping trip through the Soviet Union, Agre was an inconsistent student until he developed an interest in science from his father who was a college chemistry professor.Agre graduated from Roosevelt High School before he received his B.A. in Chemistry from Augsburg University in Minneapolis and his M.D. in 1974 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. From 1975 to 1978, he completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine at Case Western Reserve University's Case Medical Center under Charles C.J. Carpenter. He subsequently did a Hematology-Oncology fellowship at North Carolina Memorial Hospital of UNC Chapel Hill. In 1981, Agre returned to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to join the lab of Vann Bennett in the Department of Cell Biology.
In 1984, Agre was recruited to the faculty of the Department of Medicine led by Victor A. McKusick. He subsequently joined the Department of Biological Chemistry led by Dan Lane. Agre rose to full professor in 1992 and remained at Johns Hopkins until 2005. Agre then served as the Vice Chancellor for Science and Technology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where he guided the development of Duke's biomedical research. In 2008, he returned to Johns Hopkins, where he directs the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and holds a joint appointment in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
In 2004, Agre received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In February 2014, he was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching the next generation of scholars. The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships were established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg.
Personal life
Agre and his wife, Mary, have been married since 1975. They have three daughters, one son, and two young granddaughters. Agre is an Eagle Scout and recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award. Two of his brothers, also physicians, and his son Clarke, a public defender, are also Eagle Scouts. Agre enjoys wilderness canoeing in the arctic and cross-country skiing, having completed the 60 mile Vasaloppet ski race in Sweden five times. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2012, Agre has had to reduce his activities."I identify more with Huckleberry Finn than with Albert Einstein," he told Scouting magazine.
Agre is known among science students for his humanity and humility. He appeared on The Colbert Report, discussing his role as a founding member of Scientists and Engineers for America, sound science in politics, and the decline of American knowledge of science, among other topics.
Awards and recognition
In addition to the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Agre was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, the American Philosophical Society in 2004, the National Academy of Medicine in 2005, and the American Society for Microbiology in 2011. Agre has received 19 honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Japan, Norway, Greece, Mexico, Hungary, and the United States.Biomedical research
As a Johns Hopkins medical student in the early 1970s, Agre worked in the labs of Brad Sack and Pedro Cuatrecasas where he investigated the enterotoxin-induced diarrhea that caused dehydration and death of small children in developing countries. After clinical training, Agre joined Vann Bennett's lab in the Cell Biology Department at Johns Hopkins where he studied red cell membranes and identified spectrin deficiency as a common cause of hereditary spherocytosis, a hemolytic anemia with fragile, spherically shaped red cells. In 1984, Agre joined the Department of Medicine, where he built his own research program and first isolated the 32 kilodalton core subunit of the Rhesus blood group antigen, RhD.Aquaporins
While studying RhD, Agre's team serendipitously discovered a 28 kilodalton red cell membrane protein. Also abundant in kidney tubules, the 28 kDa protein was related to proteins from diverse origins, including fruit fly brain, mammalian lens, bacteria, and plants. Since the function was unknown, Agre consulted John C. Parker, his former hematology professor at the University of North Carolina, who suggested that the protein may be the long-sought water channel responsible for rapid movements of water across the membranes of red cells and certain other cell types.Teaming up with William Guggino at the Department of Physiology at Johns Hopkins, Agre's postdoctoral fellow Gregory Preston confirmed water channel function by expressing the cRNA in Xenopus laevis oocytes that then became osmotically active and exploded in fresh water. The 28 kDa protein is now known as aquaporin-1, the archetypal member of a large family of water channel proteins. Aquaporins are "the plumbing system for cells," said Agre. Every cell is primarily water. "But the water doesn't just sit in the cell, it moves through it in a very organized way. The process occurs rapidly in tissues that have these aquaporins or water channels." For 100 years, scientists assumed that water leaked through the cell membrane, and some water does. "But the very rapid movement of water through some cells was not explained by this theory," said Agre.
Agre's team and others identified paralogs in different tissues, and twelve aquaporins exist in humans. Permeated by water, aquaporins are required for generation of cerebrospinal fluid, aqueous humour, tears, sweat, saliva, humidification of airways, and renal concentration. Defects include cerebral edema, dry eye, anhydrosis, dehydration and water retention. Permeated by water plus glycerol, aquaglyceroporins confer glycerol uptake to the basal level of skin, glycerol release from fat during fasting, and glycerol uptake by liver where it is converted to glucose. Aquaporins and aquaglyceroporins exist in all life forms including invertebrates, plants, microbes, archaea, and parasites including the plasmodia that cause malaria.
2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
In October 2003, it was announced that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry would go to two medical doctors, Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon, "for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes." Credited for discovery of the aquaporin water channels, Agre was in bed at 5:30 am when the call came from Stockholm. Upon learning the news later, his mother responded, "That's very nice but don't let it go to his head." MacKinnon, credited with solving the structure and selectivity of potassium channels, was traveling back from a weekend fishing trip and only learned the news from colleagues.Malaria
Long interested in diseases of the developing world, Agre and his team investigated aquaporins in malaria parasites, malaria mosquitoes, and cerebral malaria. In 2008, Agre became Director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Launched in 2001 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg and the Bloomberg Philanthropies, JHMRI includes 20 faculty members whose lab efforts include development of mosquitoes resistant to malaria transmission, design of novel malaria vaccines, biological studies of potential malaria drug targets and search for novel anti-malarial medicines.Fieldwork in rural Africa is central to the JHMRI mission. A long-term partnership was initiated in 2003 with Macha Research Trust, a faith-based research program led by Dr. Philip Thuma that is affiliated with a former mission hospital in rural southern Zambia. With resources from JHMRI, a small modern research campus was constructed where African scientists and visiting scientists from Johns Hopkins are studying malaria drug resistance, mosquito insecticide resistance, and rates of malaria transmission. Since introduction of artemisinin combination therapy in 2003 and distribution of insecticide treated bed nets in 2007, the burden of malaria in small children has declined in Macha by 96%.
Receipt of an International Center of Excellence in Malaria Research Award from the US National Institutes of Health in 2010 allowed expansion of the JHMRI program in Africa. New field sites were organized in partnership with African agencies in northern Zambia and southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where malaria control has failed, and in eastern Zimbabwe at the border of Mozambique, where malaria has become resurgent.