Peter Agre
The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places; I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.Collection: Health
We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.Collection: Christmas
Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.Collection: Medical
While the lab plays an enormous role, research is also influenced by inner peace of mind and one's family environment, depending on what stage of one's life and career a scientist is at.Collection: Peace
Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.Collection: Teacher
Now in the 21st century, the boundaries separating chemistry, physics, and medicine have become blurred, and as happened during the Renaissance, scientists are following their curiosities even when they run beyond the formal limits of their training.
My goal was to develop into an independent research scientist studying clinical problems at the laboratory bench, but I felt that postgraduate residency training in internal medicine was necessary.
Mother had to support herself at age 18 because it was during the depression and when my grandfather lost the farm and there was no place for her; she worked as an assistant to a maid.
It is a remarkable honor to receive a Nobel Prize, because it not only recognizes discoveries, but also their usefulness to the advancement of fundamental science.
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.
My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom's cousins, and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.
Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.
The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm.
Our lab had always refrained from keeping our studies secret.
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.
I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father's people are buried there.
Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.
Well, all life forms are dependent upon water.
So, my advice to young scientists is, think critically about your work; probably don't blab unnecessarily.
Well, my take was people of Minnesota, these are good people. They're in many ways more generous than other parts of the country. They're better educated than other parts of the country.
Often times the public school teachers are ridiculed or they are made to feel inferior but this is really undeserved.
Water is commonly regarded as the 'solvent of life,' since our bodies are 70% water. All other vertebrates, invertebrates, microbes, and plants are also primarily water. The organization of water within biological compartments is fundamental to life, and the aquaporins serve as the plumbing systems for cells.
In science, one should use all available resources to solve difficult problems. One of our most powerful resources is the insight of our colleagues.
Written in 1895, Alfred Nobel's will endowed prizes for scientific research in chemistry, physics, and medicine. At that time, these fields were narrowly defined, and researchers were often classically trained in only one discipline. In the late 19th century, knowledge of science was not a requisite for success in other walks of life.
There are over 50 brilliant scientists working at my lab, and being sensitive to their needs is among the top skill sets that scientists like me have to learn.
For me, the discovery of aquaporins was like a gift after 25 years in basic science.
One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that way.
My wife and I have four children, and none of them are in lab science, so clearly I returned home at night and presented a fairly unattractive example of a scientific life.
To my knowledge, there's never been a scientist in the U.S. Senate.
There is an anti-science by the far right. We have to be careful that the far left doesn't balance this with a naive approach of promising what we can't deliver. I mean, science is neutral; it's not politically conservative or liberal.
I think there's nothing about evolution in the Bible; I think this is a statement of religious insecurity. But people have their beliefs.
Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.
Our single greatest defense against scientific ignorance is education, and early in the life of every scientist, the child's first interest was sparked by a teacher.Collection: Teacher
The need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher. Lack of scientific fundamentals causes people to make foolish decisions about issues such as the toxicity of chemicals, the efficacy of medicines, the changes in the global climate.Collection: Medicine