Samuel Mitja Rapoport (27 November 1912 – 7 July 2004) was a Russian Empire-born German university professor of biochemistry in East Germany. Of Jewish descent and a committed communist, he fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and moved to the United States. In 1950, as a result of an investigation of un-American activities, he was offered a professorship in East Berlin. He was married to the renowned pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport.
Biography
Throughout his life Samuel Mitja Rapoport saw danger and exile. Rapoport was born in Volhynia near the Russian-Austrian border in what is now Ukraine and his family resided there from 1912 to 1916. They later moved to Odessa, Russia on the Black Sea coast. At the conclusion of the World War I he saw the Russian Revolution and witnessed the barbaric warfare of the Russian Civil War.
His family left Odessa for Vienna, Austria in 1920. Already sympathetic to left-wing views, he joined the Communist Party out of protest against the rise of fascism. At the age of 13 he found in his father's archives works written by Friedrich Engels. By reading them he was fascinated by socialist ideas. His own painful experiences of war, injustice, banishment, political and racial persecution brought him to a socialist world-view up to his end of life. He was active in communist organizations from his youth and became a member of the Socialist pupils in Vienna, then he participated in the illegal Austrian communist movement. But he didn't follow ideological extremes. He was directed by a deep humanity, he loved reasoning and discussing, he had a great inquiring mind and he had the ability to connect theoretical knowledge, philosophical views and practical realization.
In Vienna he studied medicine and chemistry receiving his doctorate. In 1933 he attended the Institute for Medical Chemistry and worked on the analysis of amino acids in the blood serum.
When the annexation of Austria by Nazi-Germany was imminent, he received a scholarship for scientific studies and clinical work at the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1938. At the time this hospital was a leader in research and medical treatment. During his tenure at this hospital he served as a pediatrician and earned a second doctorate.
During World War II his research focused on blood conservation. He worked to prolong the shelf life of blood altering conservation media in order to preserve the energy metabolism of erythrocytes. He succeeded in extending the maximum storage time for blood from one to three weeks. His efforts saved the lives of thousands of US soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen. For these efforts he was honored by President Harry S. Truman with a Certificate of Merit.
In 1944 while in Cincinnati he met the German emigrant and physician Ingeborg Syllm, they married in 1946. Ingeborg Syllm, born in 1912 in Cameroon was the daughter of a Protestant couple, she had studied medicine in Hamburg, and fled to the US in September 1938.
While in the US he supported the trade union and communist movement. Together with his wife he delivered the paper "The Worker" on the weekends and got involved with the civil rights movement.
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. During a congress of pediatricians in Switzerland in 1950 he received information that he was a target of the anticommunist McCarthy commission. As a result of this warning he chose not to return to the US and his wife brought their children to Zurich. The Rapoports moved to Vienna, where for a short time he again worked at the Institute for Medical Chemistry. But the university refused his appointment for professorship due to the intervention of the US government. France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union all refused his services. Rapoport rejected a job offer by the Weizmann Institute in Israel on the grounds of his anti-Zionist beliefs.
In 1951 the East German Humboldt University in East Berlin offered Rapoport the professorship and directorship of the Institute for Physiological Chemistry at the Charité Hospital. He accepted political asylum as well as the chance to continue his work.
While in Berlin he wrote the text, Medical Biochemistry dictated in only three months. This book became a bestseller in both the medical communities in East and West Germany. It was printed in 9 editions with 60,000 copies, and was translated in several languages.