Dr. Peter Agre is getting ready to dye his lab coat Duke blue. After two dozen years at Johns Hopkins University, he has picked up a Nobel Prize and a host of other accolades. Now he is coming to Duke as the first vice chancellor for science and technology—and as the only Nobel laureate at the University, he’ll be something of a superhero.
But as Agre juggles his duties as a scientific and media superhero, the “average Joe” in him still shines through the professional glamour and decoration.
“I still bring a brown bag lunch, ride a bicycle to work and take a break in the middle of the day and swim laps,” Agre said. “My dog still doesn’t like me any more than before.”
But Agre’s friends said he has stood out ever since medical school.
Dr. Vann Bennett was Agre’s medical school roommate and remains close friends with the chemist.
“He was wild. When I first met him, he was wearing a turban at a party. He had just come back from a year in Asia traveling after he graduated from college a year early. He had acquired a Sikh turban,” said Bennett, professor of cell biology at Duke.
Bennett said he has never known Agre to back down from a challenge. When he finally took a tenure-track position as a researcher at Johns Hopkins in 1981, he had to pack up his family and move from Chapel Hill, where he had recently completed a fellowship.
“He sold his house to an airport controller, during when airport controllers went on strike. He bought Peter’s house and couldn’t pay for it, so he had a lot of difficulty in that move to Baltimore,” Bennett said. “A lot of people would have been intimidated by the lack of security, but he went ahead and did this, and the rest is history.”
That history was a decade in the making. While performing various routine blood experiments, Agre stumbled upon what he and his laboratory would be dedicated to for the next 15 years. He had discovered aquaporins, the proteins that direct the movement of water in and out of cells. The significance of this finding was matched by Agre’s excitement at the numerous research opportunities it would bring.
Eventually Agre would win a Nobel Prize for his work.
“The 11 years between discovery of the water channel and the Nobel were a blur of intense scientific work by my group and our collaborators at other universities,” Agre said.
During this decade, Agre made 260 trips across the country and abroad in order to bring his research to scientific meetings and other universities. This particularly packed schedule strained his personal life, he said. Agre even missed the high school graduation of one of his daughters.
All the while, Agre and his team continued to investigate aquaporins—discovering uses for them in the root systems of plants, fluid in spinal columns and activity in yeast, fat cells, white blood cells and the liver. It had taken 11 years for Agre to finally settle down in his scientific life and only a few minutes for a simple, early morning phone call to shatter the fragile balance.
“The announcement from Stockholm on October 8, 2003 caused immediate and unbridled jubilation in my lab and throughout our medical school,” Agre said.
The voice on the other line told an unbelieving Agre that he had just been named the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
“While it was not obvious to me at first, the Nobel announcement marked the end of my life as a private citizen—and the beginning of my public life,” Agre said.
Over the next several hours, Agre was bombarded with 1,000 e-mails and dozens of phone calls. Fortunately the media relations office at Johns Hopkins was able to direct Agre toward the most important ones, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The attention gave Agre a spotlight to air an issue of grave concern for him—the arrest and persecution of Dr. Thomas Butler by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Butler, chief of the infectious disease division at Texas Tech University, was arrested in January 2003 for making false statements to the FBI pertaining to the disappearance of 30 vials of plague from his lab. Researchers in the United States have easy access to samples of plague and Butler himself had been researching the bacteria for over 25 years. Scientists across the nation have spoken out against the injustice imposed upon Butler.
While Agre was off campaigning for science, his lab continued work with aquaporins—often with its flagship scientist away.
“It’s been a mixed blessing—we’ve got to do some fun things since he won the prize,” said Jennifer Carbrey, Agre’s lab manger at Hopkins, who will accompany him to Duke in July. “It’s also been hard because he’s been so busy, and we don’t get to see him so much, and we’ve had to fend for ourselves much more.”
Despite the media storm and a second, more potent round of traveling, Agre welcomes these opportunities to encourage young scientists and bring his research to American citizens. When he steps into his role at Duke, a large part of his work will be that advocacy role that until now has been an add-on.
“This is not something that I would necessarily have chosen,” Agre said of his media fame. “The recognition has been gratifying, but the loss of privacy has been withering.”
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