2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 8 October 2003.

The citation

Half of the prize goes to Peter Agre "for the discovery of water channels". Half of the prize goes to Roderick MacKinnon "for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels".

The laureates

Peter Agre was born in 1949 in Northfield, the United States, and is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore. Roderick MacKinnon was born in 1956 in Burlington, the United States, and is affiliated with the Rockefeller University, New York and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Why it matters

Agre discovered the channels that let water in and out of cells, and MacKinnon showed how channels for charged atoms such as potassium work. Such channels are essential to the kidneys, the nervous system and the heart.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.