Dr. Peter C. Agre's decision to leave the Johns Hopkins University laboratory that brought him the Nobel Prize may have disappointed colleagues, but it's not surprising in the rarefied world of science laureates.
Greeted with job offers and distracted by speaking engagements, many winners experience a restless desire to influence the broader direction of science after reaching the pinnacle of individual achievement.
Laureate Harold E. Varmus left his California lab to head the National Institutes of Health, where he oversaw a near-doubling of the research budget, then moved on to run the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Biologist David Baltimore lingered to help start a biomedical research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he won a share of a Nobel in 1975, before departing to run Rockefeller University and, later, the California Institute of Technology.
Thomas R. Cech was almost an exception. He remained a productive University of Colorado lab rat for more than a decade before succumbing to an offer to run the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, one of the largest private funders of medical science in the world. He retains his lab.
"When you get the Nobel, what you have ... is a sense of tremendous freedom, but at the same time a sense of tremendous responsibility," said Cech, who took on advisory duties and a freshman chemistry class immediately after winning a share of the 1989 chemistry prize.
Agre, who shared the 2003 prize in chemistry, expressed similar sentiments this week for taking a job at Duke University. There, he will maintain a lab but have broad policy responsibilities as vice chancellor for science and technology.
The desire to move on is often strongest among those like Agre, 55, who is in the latter half of a distinguished career. "I mean, I don't have three or four moves ahead of me," said Agre. "This may be it."
By mid-career, many scientists are ready for something different, and institutions that want to attract the most accomplished know the drill.
They dangle the chance to influence the scientific direction of a university or institute, perhaps one with an endowment that obviates the otherwise constant need to grovel for grants.
It doesn't hurt when a respected colleague is already at the wooing institution - as was the case with Agre.
Although a salary sweetener is generally thrown in, money often isn't the primary motivator.
"It's definitely not salary and benefits - it's not like industry," said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, an influential Johns Hopkins cancer researcher. "It's really for much better reasons."
Dr. Victor J. Dzau, vice chancellor for health affairs at Duke, said one reason he was interested in Agre is that he has the "drive and passion to think much more globally about science - the issues about where science is going in this country, [and] how do we educate the younger people?"
Dr. Elias Zerhouni, a former Hopkins executive who now runs the National Institutes of Health, has been on both sides of the tug-of-war. At Hopkins, he worked to retain Agre after Duke extended a job offer a few years ago. More recently, he tried to lure Agre to head the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
"He's really seeking ways of turning his own success, and his own impact on science, to the benefit of others, especially young scientists," Zerhouni said.
Hopkins' Vogelstein, whose work is among the most-cited by other scientists worldwide, wouldn't estimate how often he gets job offers. But both Dr. J. Michael Bishop, who shared the 1989 prize in physiology or medicine with Varmus, and Cech said the number of offers didn't change appreciably for them after the Nobel because they were already getting plenty.
"I had [already] been offered a floor of a building at Harvard, a floor of a building at the Rockefeller, and a job at ... Berkeley, which I had turned down," Cech said.
But the Nobel changed his life in more prosaic says. "It was a very different experience to be asked for my autograph in the grocery store," he said.
Still, there's no question the Nobel opens doors, said Anders Barany, of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.
But in some lamentable cases, he said, laureates may "wander off into becoming wise men" who are no longer are productive in their labs.
The most fantastic career switch Barany can remember is that of Donald A. Glaser, the 1960 physics laureate.
"He had been working for a long, long time, focusing on making detectors for high-energy particles for physics," Barany said. Barany is convinced that when Glazer won, he thought, "Great! Finally I can leave this dull field of physics and become a brain specialist."
