2003 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry is inaugural speaker for Joseph Silva Jr. Basic Science Lecturership

Peter Agre, the 2003 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, will be the inaugural speaker for the Joseph Silva Jr. Basic Science Lectureship, named in honor of the former dean of the UC Davis School of Medicine.

Agre, Vice Chancellor of Science and Technology and professor of cell biology at Duke University, will speak on Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 4:10 p.m. in Lecture Hall 180 of Medical Sciences I-C on the UC Davis campus. The title of his lecture is “Aquaporin Water Channels: From Atomic Structure to Clinical Medicine.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Agre the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of his laboratory’s 1991 discovery of the long-sought “channels” that regulate and facilitate water molecule transport through cell membranes, a process essential to all living organisms.

The discovery of the water channel, dubbed “water pore” or aquaporin, ushered in a golden age of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies of these proteins in bacteria, plants and mammals. It also led to a 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 for drugs that can specifically target water channel defects.

Silva served as dean of the School of Medicine and CEO of UC Davis Health System from 1997 to January 2005, when he returned to his faculty position in the UC Davis Department of Internal Medicine. Previously, he served as professor and chair of internal medicine from 1982-1997.