Efraim Racker

Efraim Racker, Ephraim Racker, ( born June 28, 1913 in Nowy Sacz, † September 9, 1991 ) was an American biochemist.

Life

Racker was born in Galicia in the former Austria - Hungary, came from a Jewish family and grew up in Vienna. His brother Heinrich Racker was a well-known psychoanalyst. Racker began his medical studies in Vienna and conducted research there on the biochemistry of neural diseases. After the annexation of Austria by the Nazis, he fled to England, where he worked for a short time in a mental hospital, and from there to the USA. There he conducted research 1941/42, at the University of Minnesota on the biochemistry of neuronal diseases, where he discovered that the polio virus inhibited glycolysis in the brain of mice. He then worked as a doctor in Harlem Hospital in New York City and in 1944 became an associate professor of microbiology at New York University Medical School. In 1952 he went to Yale University and in 1954 at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York City.

Here he made ​​his fundamental discoveries about the role of ATP in energy transfer in cells, its role as a major supplier of energy in the cell Fritz Lipmann had already shown in 1941. Racker showed that glycolysis was dependent on the presence of the ATPase and the continuous supply of ADP and phosphate groups from which ATP is made. With Maynard E. Pullam, Anima Datta and Harvey S. Penefsky they identified the enzymes involved in the synthesis of ATP in the mitochondria. The first enzyme (F1 part of the ATP synthase), they isolated in 1960.

In 1966 rascals the Department of Biochemistry at Cornell University and was a professor there.

Honors

  • Warren Triennial Prize 1974
  • National Medal of Science in 1976
  • Harvey Prize 1979
  • Gairdner Foundation International Award 1980
  • Sober Memoiral Lecture of the American Society of Biological Chemistry

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Writings

  • As editor of Energy transducing mechanisms, London, Butterworths 1975
Adenosine triphosphate Adenosine diphosphate ATP-Synthase
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