Peter Agre to begin term today as president of AAAS

Nobel laureate Peter Agre, director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, will begin his one-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science today, Feb. 16, at the close of the organization's annual meeting. Agre has served as president-elect for the past year.

Founded in 1848, AAAS is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. AAAS publishes the prestigious scientific journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs to improve the global understanding of science.

"I'm looking forward to my term as president," said Agre. "I believe strongly in the mission of the AAAS, which is to advance science and serve society."

In 2003, Agre shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Roderick MacKinnon for his discovery of aquaporins — channels that regulate and facilitate water molecule transport through cell membranes, a process essential to all living organisms.

Agre was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and to the AAAS in 2003. He holds two patents on the isolation, cloning and expression of aquaporins 1 and 5, and is the principal investigator on four current National Institutes of Health grants.

 

Barnes & Noble hosts Daniel Mark Epstein, Adam M. Smith

Barnes & Noble Johns Hopkins hosts two authors on consecutive evenings this week.

Daniel Mark Epstein, an acclaimed poet, biographer and historian, will discuss and sign copies of his latest book, Lincoln's Men: The President and his Private Secretaries, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 17.

Lincoln's Men is the first narrative portrait of the men who served as Lincoln's secretaries during the Civil War: John Nicolay, John Hay and William Stoddard. Living and working together in the White House, the young men had unlimited access to Lincoln's opinions, thoughts and decision-making processes. They read and answered the president's mail, prepared news summaries, screened visitors, witnessed a grieving Lincoln after the death of his son and continuously dealt with Mary Lincoln — or "her satanic majesty" and "the hellcat," as they referred to her.

Nicolay and Hay went on to distinguished careers in the foreign service after the war. Hay served as secretary of state under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and Nicolay served as marshal of the Supreme Court. Nicolay and Hay wrote the first full-length biography of Lincoln, 10 volumes published in 1890, and edited Lincoln's Complete Works.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 18, Adam M. Smith, an international lawyer based in Washington, D.C., will discuss and sign his latest book, After Genocide: Bringing the Devil to Justice, a look at the complex, politicized world of international criminal justice and its serious shortcomings in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere.

Smith has worked at The Hague and in the Balkans and is the son of a Holocaust refugee. He also has held positions at the United Nations and the World Bank.

 

'Ancestral Voices' opens Feb. 21 at Theatre Hopkins

Theatre Hopkins will offer two matinee staged-reading performances of Ancestral Voices, by A.R. Gurney, at 2 p.m. on consecutive Saturdays, Feb. 21 and 28, at the Swirnow Theater in the Mattin Center on the Homewood campus.

Gurney returns to his roots in Ancestral Voices, a portrait of the author as a young boy reliving a golden summer just before World War II with his grandfather, whose sudden divorce is a scandal among the gentry of Buffalo, N.Y. This staged reading crafted by Gurney, who also wrote The Dining Room, was a cherished project of the actors Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman.

Theatre Hopkins' cast includes J.R. Lyston, Patrick Martyn, Michael O'Connell, Nona Porter and Cherie Weinert. Tickets are $10; student rush tickets for $5 are available at curtain time, if space allows.

For reservations or information regarding this production, or Lisa Kron's Well, running concurrently, contact Theatre Hopkins at 410-516-7159 or thehop@jhu.edu.

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