Former March of Dimes Grantee Wins the Nobel Prize

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., OCTOBER 8, 2003 -- Peter C. Agre, M.D., professor of biological chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a former March of Dimes research grantee, shares this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Roderick MacKinnon, M.D., professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at the Rockefeller University.  The two scientists were honored for discoveries concerning the tiny channels in cell membranes through which materials move into and out of living cells.  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Prize, called this research of great importance for our understanding of many diseases, including diseases of the kidneys, heart, muscles and nervous system.

Dr. Agre (pronounced AHG-ray) was a March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar in 1985-87 while studying red blood cell (RBC) membrane protein defects that cause a form of anemia.  The work for which he won the Nobel Prize began shortly afterward with his finding a different, previously unknown RBC membrane protein that turned out to be a channel.  The Academy praised Dr. Agre’s research, saying that his 1991 discovery of that channel, which he showed to regulate water molecule transport through cell membranes, “opened the door to a whole series of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies of water channels in bacteria, plants and mammals.”

This year’s Prize illustrates how contemporary biochemistry reaches down to the atomic level in its quest to understand the fundamental processes of life, the Academy said.

According to his Johns Hopkins bio, Dr. Agre was born in Minnesota in 1949, went to 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, Dr. Agre returned to Hopkins, where he progressed through the ranks of the departments of medicine and cell biology.  He was recruited to his present post in the department of biological chemistry in 1993.

Nobel Prizes are presented each year on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.