Duke Losing Nobel Laureate: Agre Goes Jan. 1 to Johns Hopkins

Oct 26, 05:41 AM

Current Headlines: By Jane Stancill, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Oct. 26--DURHAM -- Just as one Triangle campus gained a full-time Nobel Prize winner, another campus has lost one.

Nobel Laureate Peter Agre of Duke University has been named director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in Baltimore.

On Jan. 1, he will join the faculty at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. Duke hired Agre two years ago as vice chancellor for science and technology. He was the university's first full-time professor with a Nobel Prize.

He is not leaving Duke entirely. He will remain as a professor of cell biology and medicine and a senior adviser on health affairs at Duke, where he will maintain a lab. He also will lead the development of a consortium of malaria researchers at Johns Hopkins, Duke and in the Triangle.

Agre turned his research attention to malaria in 2004, a year after winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Roderick MacKinnon. The two scientists won for discoveries of channels in cell membranes. Agre revealed the molecular basis for the movement of water in and out of cells.

Agre was traveling overseas Thursday and could not be reached. But in the Johns Hopkins announcement, he said he had always had an interest in working on diseases in the developing world. Malaria kills more than 1 million people a year, he said, including many children.

The researcher is returning to a place where he spent much of his career. He received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1974 and later became a professor there. Early in his career, he did post-graduate medical training and a fellowship at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Agre recently praised UNC-CH scientist Oliver Smithies, who this year won the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Earlier this year, Agre, a Minnesota native, took a leave of absence from Duke to consider a 2008 run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota. After consulting with people in his home state, he decided not to run.

jane.stancill@newsobserver.com or (919) 956-2464

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