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.
The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher... Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate.
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.
The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm.
We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.
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.
Our lab had always refrained from keeping our studies secret.