Laureates inspire research persistence

Students and alumni gathered in Shriver Hall Friday afternoon to hear two of Hopkins’s most renowned researchers discuss their work at the year’s final Foreign Affairs Symposium event.

Dr. Peter Agre, a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the director of the Bloomberg School’s Malaria Research Institute, and Dr. Carol Greider, the director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences, spoke at the event.

Agre shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in discovering aquaporins, a protein that can cause malaria. Greider shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her role in discovering telomeres, DNA sequences that serve as a “cap” on the end of a chromosome and keep the chromosome from deteriorating.

The audience was comprised of students, alumni and interested community members from a variety of different fields. Sensing an audience of laypersons, the Nobel laureates avoided discussing the details of their discoveries, and instead discussed the processes that led them to their discoveries and what the scientific process means to them.

While both researchers work in dramatically different fields, they both emphasized collaboration with others and curiosity as virtues that helped them succeed. Agre emphasized the importance of working with others, crediting productive relationships with colleagues for helping him to discover aquaporins.

In fact, Agre’s belief in cooperation supersedes the fiercest of political divisions. Agre, who is also the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, spoke excitedly about leading an AAAS delegation to North Korea to meet with researchers there.

Agre said he and the other Americans were impressed by the North Korean scientists they met. “They’re serious people, and they’re doing important research,” he said, adding that he hoped that the two bitter political enemies would be able to expand peaceful scientific cooperation.

Towards the end of the discussion, Greider observed that the research for which both she and Agre won the Nobel Prize had been departures from their initial fields of study.

“I think both of us were attracted to a different question when we found something we couldn’t explain,“ said Greider, explaining that she had not set out to find the telomeres, but rather found initial evidence for them while researching something else.

Greider’s message that major breakthroughs often come from seemingly inaccurate data stuck with freshman Eric Wan, a student who attended the event. Wan, a pre-med student majoring in molecular and cellular biology, conducts research for Dr. Fidel Zavala, a colleague of Agre at the Malaria Research Institute.

Wan noted that undergraduates conducting research in his lab often are discouraged when they get an unexpected result, considering the result “wrong.” While such a result can be a sign of a researcher’s error, it can also lead to a breakthrough.

“We’re all working in labs and expecting a certain result,” Wan said. “When we see something wrong, we often dismiss it instead of investigating it.”

Wan felt that he left with a better understanding of how Agre’s research at the Malaria Research Institute relates to the research he is doing with Dr. Zavala. While Agre is discovering the causes of malaria, Zavala is attempting to create the first protein-based vaccine to prevent malaria with a 100 percent success rate.

“The value of the [Malaria] Institute is [that] it brings different minds together,” Wan said. “Hopefully that’s how we’ll make the next great discovery.”