Samuel Mitja Rapoport

Samuel Mitja Rapoport (1912 to 2004) was a Russian-born physician and biochemist who became the most important representative of East German biochemistry. Raised in Odessa and Vienna, where he studied medicine and chemistry, he left Austria after the Nazi annexation and worked as a pediatrician and researcher at the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati. During the Second World War he extended the storage life of preserved blood from one to three weeks, work credited with saving many soldiers. A committed communist, he left the United States in 1950 after a warning about an anticommunist investigation and in 1951 took the chair of physiological chemistry at the Charite in East Berlin. His research covered water and electrolyte balance and the metabolism of red blood cells, including the role of 2,3-bisphosphoglycerate now named in the Luebering-Rapoport pathway. His textbook Medical Biochemistry sold widely in both German states, and in 1982 he chaired the physicians' group against nuclear war.