Agre has received 19 honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Japan, Norway, Greece, Mexico, Hungary, and the United States. In February 2014, Agre was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching the next generation of scholars. The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships were established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg. Agre and his wife Mary have been married since 1975, and have three daughters, one son, and two young granddaughters. Agre is an Eagle Scout and recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award (DESA). Two of his brothers, also physicians, and his son Clarke, a public defender, are also Eagle Scouts. Agre enjoys wilderness canoeing in the arctic and cross-country skiing, having completed the 60 mile Vasaloppet ski race in Sweden five times. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2012, Agre has had to reduce his activities. "I identify more with Huckleberry Finn than with Albert Einstein," he told Scouting magazine. Agre is known among science students for his humanity and humility. He appeared on "The Colbert Report", discussing his role as a founding member of Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA), sound science in politics, and the decline of American knowledge of science, among other topics. As a Johns Hopkins medical student in the early 1970s, Agre worked in the labs of Brad Sack and Pedro Cuatrecasas where he investigated the enterotoxin-induced diarrhea that caused dehydration and death of small children in developing countries. After clinical training, Agre joined Vann Bennett's lab in the Cell Biology Department at Johns Hopkins where he studied red cell membranes and identified spectrin deficiency as a common cause of hereditary spherocytosis, a hemolytic anemia with fragile, spherically shaped red cells. In 1984, Agre joined the Department of Medicine where he built his own research program and first isolated the 32 kilodalton core subunit of the Rhesus blood group antigen, RhD. While studying RhD, Agre's team serendipitously discovered a 28 kilodalton red cell membrane protein. Also abundant in kidney tubules, the 28 kDa protein was related to proteins from diverse origins including fruit fly brain, mammalian lens, bacteria, and plants. Since the function was unknown, Agre consulted John C. Parker, his former hematology professor at the University of North Carolina, who suggested that the protein may be the long-sought water channel responsible for rapid movements of water across the membranes of red cells and certain other cell types.