Short abstract
Former physician, biochemist, European Jewish émigré, and Communist who fled McCarthyite persecution in the United States
In the late 1930s many eminent Jewish scientists and doctors left Germany and eastern Europe in fear of persecution by the Nazis. Most of them successfully pursued their careers in Britain or the United States, and only a handful returned to Germany after the second world war.
Mitja Rapoport was an outstanding exception. Not only did he come back to Europe, but he also crossed the cold war borders and, after settling in East Berlin, was able to enhance his scientific reputation in the Eastern as well as the Western scientific community.
On his 90th birthday in 2002, Berlin's Charité Hospital, where Rapoport was director of the biochemistry institute for 30 years, honoured Rapoport as “Berlin's most eminent biochemist after the second world war.” His merits as scientist and university teacher were always uniquely praised, while his political engagement as a lifelong member of the Communist Party was often controversial or even condemned.
Mitja Rapoport was born in Woloczysk in the Ukraine and grew up in Odessa on the Black Sea coast. His family left the Ukraine for Vienna, where he studied medicine and joined the Communist Party out of protest against the surging tide of fascism. In 1938 he received a scholarship to pursue his scientific studies and clinical work at the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinatti, Ohio, in the United States, and decided to stay on there after Hitler occupied Austria.
Figure 1.
In Cincinatti he met his wife, Ingeborg, a paediatrician and a half Jewish emigrant from Hamburg. Rapoport's main research topics were the water and electrolyte balance of the body and erythrocyte metabolism. With his technical assistant, Jane Luebering, he discovered important enzymes that are active within the so called “Rapoport Luebering Shunt,” an auto-regulative metabolic cell cycle.
During the second world war his research focused on blood conservation, trying to prolong its lifespan by altering conservation media in order to preserve the energy metabolism of erythrocytes. He succeeded in extending the maximum blood storage time from one to three weeks, thereby saving the lives of thousands of GIs, for which he was honoured by US President Harry S Truman with the certificate of merit.
Despite his gratitude towards the United States, which had offered him citizenship and work, Rapoport continued to be politically active as a member of the Communist Party. Had it not been for the anti-communist hysteria being whipped up in the United States in the 1950s, chiefly by Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, the Rapoports might not have left for Europe at all. As it was the couple attended a paediatric conference in Zurich in 1950, at a time when it was generally suspected that they would be invited to appear before the McCarthy committee investigating people's political past, and they decided to stay away.
Rapoport rejected a job offer by the Weizmann Institute in Israel on the grounds that he wasn't a Zionist. He tried for a post in Vienna, but without success because of an American intervention, which left him and his wife—who was pregnant with their fourth child—unemployed for a year.
In 1951 Humboldt University in East Berlin offered Rapoport the professorship and directorship of the Institute for Physiological Chemistry at the Charité. Gratefully he accepted political asylum as well as the chance to continue his work. “His German with an Austrian-American accent brought some colour into our student life,” remembers one of his pupils, the biochemist Eberhard Hofmann from the University of Leipzig, of his unusual teacher.
Rapoport's scientific work—he published 666 papers, the last in 1996—thrived. Additionally, he engaged himself as a fervent teacher by establishing popular biochemical seminars for medical students and writing one of the bestsellers of the medical community in East and West Germany, Medical Biochemistry. Meanwhile, his wife, Ingeborg, founded the specialism of neonatology in East Germany and was offered the chair at the Charité.
As one of the founders and reorganisers of East German research, he was hit hard in the 1990s by German reunification, which led to the abolition of some East German scientific activities following an evaluation by West German scientists. To him East Germany remained the better alternative to the fascist state that had caused the death of millions.
Samuel Mitja Rapoport leaves Ingeborg, two daughters, two sons, and nine grandchildren.
Samuel Mitja Rapoport, former physician and researcher Cincinatti, Ohio, United States, and biochemist Berlin (b Woloczysk 1912; q Vienna 1936), d 6 July 2004.