Using a Leadership Role to Put a Human Face on Science - A CONVERSATION WITH PETER AGRE

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In February, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Peter Agre, 60, will be inducted as the 163rd president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest scientific organization. Dr. Agre is the director of the Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. We spoke in January for two hours in a back room at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore (the current exhibition is “The Marriage of Art, Science & Philosophy”) and also later on the telephone. An edited version of the conversations follows.

Q. YOU WON THE 2003 NOBEL CHEMISTRY PRIZE FOR YOUR DISCOVERY OF AQUAPORINS. WHAT EXACTLY ARE THEY?

A. The plumbing system for cells. Every cell in our body 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.

Until 1985, when my lab found the protein they are made of, aquaporins hadn’t yet been identified. There had been a controversy in biology for more than 100 years about how water moved through cells. The assumption was that it somehow leaked through the cell membrane. And indeed some water moves that way. But the very rapid movement of water through some cells was not explained by this theory.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/science/27agre.html?th&emc=th