Science in the public sphere

Dr Peter Agre, the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, is giving a free public lecture at Melbourne's Howard Florey Institute tomorrow evening focusing on the importance science education.

Agre will draw on his personal history as he examines the role of science in the public sphere and will trace the unusual story of his own scientific development.

His life in science began in a small Minnesota farming community, where he narrowly passed high school chemistry.

He won the Nobel for his laboratory's 1991 discovery of the channels that regulate and facilitate water molecule transport through cell membranes. The discovery of the channel, dubbed a 'water pore', ushered in a golden age of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies of these proteins in bacteria, plants and mammals, and fundamental understanding at the molecular level of malfunctioning channels associated with many diseases of the kidneys, skeletal muscle and other organs.

Working from this basic knowledge, scientists are searching the drugs that can specifically target water channel defects. Agre shared the Nobel with Roderick MacKinnon, a Rockefeller University scientist who determined the spatial structure of the cell membrane channels that control passage of salts. He is currently the Vice Chancellor for Science and Technology at Duke University in North Carolina.

Agre will deliver the Florey's 11th Kenneth Myer Lecture at 6:30pm on Thursday, 12 July at the Old Arts Building at the University of Melbourne. Booking are essential: email lecture@florey.edu.au or phone 03 8344 1833 today to reserve tickets.