This is shaping up to be a banner year for Case Western Reserve University in Nobel Prize competition.

A Case alumnus who later was a visiting professor in radiology here and a biochemist who completed his medical fellowship at the university have been awarded Nobel prizes in physiology or medicine and chemistry, respectively.

Case alumnus Paul C. Lauterbur, a pioneer in the development of magnetic resonance imaging, has won the 2003 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, while former Case fellow Peter C. Agre, who discovered the proteins that govern the movement of water in and out of cells, has won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Lauterbur shares the physiology or medicine prize with Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in England, while Agre shares the chemistry prize with Roderick MacKinnon, a biophysicist at Rockefeller University in New York.

Lauterbur, who graduated from the Case Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1951, received an honorary doctorate from Case in 2000 and the university's Michelson-Morley Award in 1984. He also served as Case's Theodore J. and Jean W. Castele professor of radiology in spring 1993.

Currently, he is a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Mansfield was a research associate.

Lauterbur was among the first scientists to use nuclear magnetic resonance in the studies of molecules, solutions and solids. He was the first researcher to produce an image with NMR and apply the technology to medicine. This led to the development of the magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which has had a revolutionary impact on the medical profession.

A faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Agre completed a fellowship in hematology at Case while a medical student at Hopkins.

His discovery of aquaporins opened avenues for research in areas ranging from anti-malaria drugs to kidney ailments to brain swelling after strokes to lung problems in premature babies and even the mechanisms of root systems in plants.

Return to the online edition of the 10-16-03 Campus News.