Dr. Peter Agre


Peter Agre was born in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1949.
He went to Theodore Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, and in 1970 earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Augsburg College in that city. He
received his medical doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1974. In 1981, after post-graduate medical training and then a fellowship at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Agre returned to Hopkins, where he progressed through the ranks of the departments of medicine and cell biology. In 1993, he became a professor in the department of biological chemistry, a position that he held until July 2005 when he joined the Duke University Medical Center as vice chancellor for science and technology.

Agre was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

In 2003, Peter Agre was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Academy recognized him for his laboratory's 1991 discovery of the long-sought "channels" that regulate and facilitate water molecule transport through cell membranes, a process essential to all living organisms. Agre shared the prize with Roderick MacKinnon, a Rockefeller University scientist who determined the spatial structure of cell membrane channels that control passage of salts.

The discovery of the water channel, dubbed "water pore" or aquaporin, opened a new field in biology and
medicine and spawned a series of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies in bacteria, plants
and mammals. These studies have provided fundamental understanding, at the molecular level, of
malfunctioning channels associated with many diseases of the kidneys, brain, skeletal muscle and other
organs. Working from this basic knowledge, scientists are searching for drugs that can specifically target
water channel defects.

Since 1995, Peter Agre has worked closely with scientists at the University of Oslo to elucidate the
roles of aquaporins in brain disease. He is affiliated with the Centre for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience as a guest professor. In 2001 the University of Oslo signed an agreement with Johns Hopkins University to promote the collaboration between the two institutions. Peter Agre has played an instrumental role in the development of this collaboration.