Tom Rapoport
Tom Abraham Rapoport ( born June 17, 1947 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA ) is a German - American biochemist. From 1985 until the end of 1994 he was a professor at the Central Institute of Molecular Biology, Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin-Buch or to its successor institution, the Max - Delbrück - Center for Molecular Medicine. Since January 1995 he is a professor of cell biology at the Medical School of Harvard University in Boston. His research activities concern in particular the differentiation of organelles in biological cells and the relevant signaling pathways for these processes.
Life
Tom Rapoport was born in 1947 in Cincinnati, the son of a pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport born Syllm and the Jewish -born biochemist Samuel Mitja Rapoport, his siblings include the 1992 with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize-winning mathematician Michael Rapoport. His father was gone in 1937 with a one-year scholarship from Austria to the United States and did not return until the end of the Nazi era in Europe, his mother fled a year later from Germany to the USA. They met in 1944 in Cincinnati and married a year after the end of the Second World War. Shortly after the birth of Tom Rapoport, the family went to Austria because his father was afraid because of the anti-communist efforts during the McCarthy - era persecution in the United States because of his communist beliefs. After an application was unsuccessful for a professorship in Vienna, he settled with his family in 1952 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) down and took a job at the Charité in Berlin. Samuel Mitja Rapoport was in the following decades in the GDR, one of the famous biochemist, his wife became professor of neonatology at the Charité.
Tom Rapoport studied from 1965 to 1966 math and science as well as from 1966 to 1972 Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1972. Its based on three professional articles dissertation paper on the reaction mechanism of pyrophosphatase from baker's he ranged as a community work together with Wolfgang Höhne, who is a professor of biochemistry at the Humboldt University since 1990 Head of the protein structure and research since 1994. After finishing his studies, Tom Rapoport joined the research group of Zinaida Rosenthal at the Central Institute of Molecular Biology, Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin-Buch, where he worked as a research assistant. During this time he cloned including the gene for the insulin of carp. He was the first scientist in the GDR, the decrypted the nucleotide sequence of a gene and the amino acid sequence of a protein. In 1977 he obtained at the Humboldt University with a thesis on the metabolic control theory, which was based as his dissertation on three journal articles, together with Reinhart Heinrich habilitation.
In 1982, he worked for several months in the laboratory Nobel Prize winner Günter Blobel at Rockefeller University in New York. Three years later he became professor of cell biology at the Central Institute of Molecular Biology, thus initiating his own research group, 1986, he was head of department. In 1992, from the Institute which belongs to the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine. In January 1995, Tom Rapoport joined as a professor of cell biology at the Department of Cell Biology, Faculty of Medicine Harvard University. In addition, he was appointed in July 1997 HHMI investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Tom Rapoport is married and father of three children.
Scientific work
The focus of research by Tom Rapoport are the elucidation of the structural and biochemical differentiation of organelles in biological cells and the study of the control of these processes of differentiation by intracellular signaling pathways. In particular, his research group explores how proteins are transported due to signal sequences by the cell and incorporated into biological membranes. He has published about 200 scientific papers, including about 20 publications in the journal Cell and a total of 25 in the journals Nature, Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Awards
Tom Rapoport was from 1988 a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR and is a member since 2003 of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and since 2005 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the Academia Europaea and the European Molecular Biology Organization and received several awards for his research. These include for example the Johannes Müller Award for Experimental Medicine, Rudolf- Virchow Prize, the Otto Warburg Medal of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Max- Delbrück Medal, the Keith R. Porter Lecture, Sir - Hans Krebs medal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies and the Schleiden medal of the Leopoldina.