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Peter Agre, Nobel Laureate.
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In October, Peter Agre, a professor of biological chemistry
and medicine at the School of Medicine, won the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry.
Agre shares the prize with Roderick MacKinnon, a scientist
with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Rockefeller
University in New York City. The two were honored for
studies of tiny transportation tunnels in cell walls,
work that contributes to fundamental chemical knowledge
on how cells function, according to the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences, the group that confers the awards.
“They have opened our eyes to a fantastic family of
molecular machines: channels, gates and valves, all of which
are needed for the cell to function. Agre received word
of the momentous honor on Oct. 8. That morning, when Agre’s
wife called his mother with the news he had won the world’s
most prestigious prize in science, his mother said, “Oh,
that’s very good, but don’t let it go to his head.”
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