Kenneth Bryan Raper

Kenneth Bryan Raper (born July 11, 1908 in Welcome (North Carolina) , USA ; † January 15, 1987 ) was a mycologist , microbiologist and botanist . Its official botanical author's abbreviation is " Raper ".

He made a significant contribution to the development of medical and industrial applications for the Aspergillus and Penicillium molds . He also discovered the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum .

Live and act

He graduated from the University of North Carolina , George Washington University and Harvard University . He began his career as a mycologist in the United States Department of Agriculture in the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils , from 1929 to 1936. He then moved within the USDA to the Bureau of Plant Industry (until 1940). There he began a collaboration with Charles Thom , with whom he published A Manual of the Aspergilli (1945) and A Manual of the Penicillia (1949).

Raper worked at the USDA's Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria from 1940 to 1953 . There he was approached in 1940 by the British penicillin researchers Raymond Florey and Ronald Heatley to help in the extraction of penicillin, at that time mainly for the treatment of the Allied soldiers of the Second World War . Based on a Penicillium strain from Alexander Fleming , he and his team continuously increased the yield and purity and thus laid the foundation for the industrial production of modern antibiotics .

After a professorship at the University of Illinois from 1946 to 1953, Raper was Professor of Bacteriology and Botany at the University of Wisconsin . In 1965 he published The Genus Aspergillus with Dorothy Fennell . Since 1966 he concentrated his work on Dictyosteliaceae , which led to the publication The Dictyostelids (1984).

Memberships

• Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Botanical Congress XI (1969)
• Chairman of four General Assemblies of the International Union of Biological Sciences
• Administrator of the American Type Culture Collection (1948-1962)
• Member of the Executive Committee of the National Research Council (1956–1961)
• Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1949)
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1949)
• Member of the American Philosophical Society (1958)

Awards

• USDA Distinguished Service Award (1947)
• Distinguished Mycologist Award of the Mycological Society of America (1981)
• first recipient of the Charles Thom Award from the Society of Industrial Microbiology (1967)

swell

• Robert H. Burris , Eldon H. Newcomb: Kenneth Bryan Raper. A Biographical Memoir

Web links

• Author entry and list of the described plant names for Kenneth Bryan Raper at the IPNI
• Kenneth B. Raper, Dorothy I. Fennell: The Production of Penicillin X in Submerged Culture . In: Journal of Bacteriology . tape 51 , no. 6 , June 1946, p. 761-777 , PMID 16561131 , PMC 518123 (free full text).