Tom Rapoport

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Tom Rapoport, 2009

Tom Abraham Rapoport (born  June 17, 1947 in Cincinnati , Ohio ) is a German - American biochemist . From 1985 to the end of 1994 he was professor at the Central Institute for Molecular Biology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin-Buch or at its successor institution, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine . Since January 1995 he has been Professor of Cell Biology at the Medical Faculty of Harvard University in Boston . His research activities particularly concern the differentiation of organelles in biological cells and the signaling pathways relevant to these processes .

Life

Tom Rapoport was born in Cincinnati in 1947 as the son of pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport, b. Syllm and the Jewish-born biochemist Samuel Mitja Rapoport , one of his three siblings is the mathematician Michael Rapoport, who was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1992 . His father went to the United States from Austria on a one-year scholarship in 1937 and did not return to Europe until the end of the Nazi era. His mother fled Germany to the United States a year later. They met in Cincinnati in 1944 and were married a year after the end of World War II . Shortly after the birth of Tom Rapoport, the family moved to Austria, as his father feared persecution in the USA because of his communist beliefs due to the anti-communist movements during the McCarthy era . After an application for a professorship in Vienna was unsuccessful, he and his family settled in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1952 and took a position at the Charité in Berlin . In the following decades, Samuel Mitja Rapoport became one of the most famous biochemists in the GDR; his wife was given a chair in neonatology at the Charité.

One of the publications by Tom Rapoport and Reinhart Heinrich on metabolic control theory ( Eur J Biochem , 1974)

Tom Rapoport studied mathematics and natural sciences from 1965 to 1966 and chemistry and biochemistry from 1966 to 1972 at the Humboldt University in Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1972 . He submitted his dissertation on the reaction mechanism of pyrophosphatase from baker's yeast , based on three specialist articles , as a joint project with Wolfgang Höhne , who has been head of the protein structure research department since 1990 and professor of biochemistry at Humboldt University since 1994. After completing his studies, Tom Rapoport joined Sinaida Rosenthal's work group at the Central Institute for Molecular Biology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin-Buch , where he worked as a research assistant. During this time, cloned it, among other things, the gene for the insulin of carp . This made him the first scientist in the GDR to decipher the nucleotide sequence of a gene and the amino acid sequence of a protein . In 1977 he gained at the Humboldt University with a thesis on metabolic control theory , like his dissertation based on three scientific articles, together with Reinhart Heinrich the Habilitation .

In 1982 he worked for a few months in the laboratory of the later Nobel Prize winner Günter Blobel at Rockefeller University in New York . Three years later he became professor of cell biology at the Central Institute for Molecular Biology, thereby leading his own research group, and in 1986 he became department head. 1992 came from the Institute for the German Helmholtz Association research centers belonging to the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine . In January 1995, Tom Rapoport switched to a professorship for cell biology in the department of cell biology at the Medical Faculty of Harvard University . He was also appointed HHMI Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in July 1997 .

Tom Rapoport is married and has three children.

Scientific work

Tom Rapoport's research focuses on the elucidation of the structural and biochemical differentiation of the various organelles in biological cells as well as the investigation of the control of these differentiation processes through intracellular signaling pathways . In particular, his research group is researching how proteins are transported through the cell on the basis of signal sequences and incorporated into biological membranes . To date, he has published around 200 scientific papers , including around 20 publications in the journal Cell and a total of around 25 in the journals Nature , Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

Awards

Tom Rapoport was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR from 1988 and has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2003 and of the American National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2005 . He is also a member of the Academia Europaea and the European Molecular Biology Organization and has received various awards for his research. These include, for example, the Johannes Müller Prize for Experimental Medicine, the Rudolf Virchow Prize , the Otto Warburg Medal of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology , the Max Delbrück Medal , the Keith R. Porter Lecture , the Sir Hans Krebs Medal from the Federation of European Biochemical Societies , the Van Deenen Medal and the Schleiden Medal from the Leopoldina.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Tom A. Rapoport (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on July 19, 2016.
  2. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter R. (PDF; 508 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved January 16, 2018 .
  3. ^ Membership directory: Tom Rapoport. Academia Europaea, accessed on January 16, 2018 (English, with biographical and other information).
personal data
SURNAME Rapoport, Tom
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rapoport, Tom Abraham (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Cincinnati , Ohio , United States