Peter Agre
Peter Agre
Peter Agre /ˈɑːɡriː/is an American physician, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, and molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistryfor his discovery of aquaporins. 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth30 January 1949
CityNorthfield, MN
CountryUnited States of America
My wife and I have four children, and none of them are in lab science, so clearly I returned home at night and presented a fairly unattractive example of a scientific life.
Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.
One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that way.
I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father's people are buried there.
Often times the public school teachers are ridiculed or they are made to feel inferior but this is really undeserved.
Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance is education, and early in the life of every scientist, the child's first interest was sparked by a teacher.
The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places; I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.
We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.
It is a remarkable honor to receive a Nobel Prize, because it not only recognizes discoveries, but also their usefulness to the advancement of fundamental science.
My goal was to develop into an independent research scientist studying clinical problems at the laboratory bench, but I felt that postgraduate residency training in internal medicine was necessary.
Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.
Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.
To my knowledge, there's never been a scientist in the U.S. Senate.
Written in 1895, Alfred Nobel's will endowed prizes for scientific research in chemistry, physics, and medicine. At that time, these fields were narrowly defined, and researchers were often classically trained in only one discipline. In the late 19th century, knowledge of science was not a requisite for success in other walks of life.