The 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded Oct. 8, honors two researchers whose pioneering work on channels in cell membranes has elucidated how ions and water molecules get in and out of cells. Such protein-based channels or pores underlie much of physiology, from the firing of nerve cells in the brain to the regulation of water by the kidneys.
Half of the $1.3-million prize goes to Roderick MacKinnon, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Rockefeller University in New York. In 1998, MacKinnon became the first scientist to determine the three-dimensional structure of an ion channel. Receiving the other half of the prize is Peter Agre of the Johns Hopkins University Medical Institutions. Agre was named for his discovery in the early 1990s of water channels called aquaporins.