Tom Rapoport | |
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| Born | (1947-06-17)June 17, 1947 (age 77) |
| Citizenship | United States,Germany (East Germany until 1990) |
| Education | Humboldt University |
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| Known for | Early development of metabolic control analysis; the endoplasmic reticulum |
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| Relatives | Michael Rapoport (brother) |
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| Fields | Cell biology |
Tom Abraham Rapoport (born June 17, 1947)[1] is a German-American cell biologist who studies protein transport in cells. Currently, he is a professor atHarvard Medical School and aHoward Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Born inCincinnati, Ohio, he grew up inEast Germany. In 1995 he accepted an offer to become a professor at Harvard Medical School. In 1997 he became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of theAmerican andGerman National Academies of Science.
Rapoport was born in Cincinnati in 1947.[1] His parents,Samuel Mitja Rapoport andIngeborg Rapoport, had fled theNazis, and when he was three years old, they fled the United States in 1950 due to being investigated forun-American activities. After a brief stay inVienna, they finally settled inBerlin in the German Democratic Republic in 1952, where his father became a Professor for Biochemistry and director of the Institute of Physiological Chemistry of theHumboldt-University, and his mother became a Professor for neonatology at theCharite Hospital. His brother is mathematicianMichael Rapoport. Tom A. Rapoport received his PhD on mathematical modeling of the kinetics of inorganic pyrophosphatase in 1972 fromHumboldt University.[2] He worked in the lab ofPeter Heitmann, and his father,Samuel Mitja Rapoport, was head of the Institute of Physiological Chemistry.[2] At Humboldt he collaborated withReinhart Heinrich on the mathematical modeling of glycolysis in red blood cells, leading to the establishment ofmetabolic control theory on which they submitted a joint 'habilitation' thesis.[3] At the same time he worked withSinaida Rosenthal, a former student of his father, on cloning theinsulin gene from carp.[2]
In 1979 he moved to the Zentralinstitut für Molekularbiologie derAkademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, later called theMax Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, where he became a professor in 1985. He moved to the United States, the country his parents fled from in 1950, in 1995. He has been a professor at theHarvard Medical School since 1995, and anHHMI investigator since 1997.
He studies several aspects of cellular secretion, including the mechanisms by which newly synthesized proteins are translocated from thecytosol to thelumen of theendoplasmic reticulum by theSec61 complex (also known as thetranslocon), how misfolded secretory proteins are degraded by endoplasmic reticulum associated protein degradation (also known asERAD), and howreticulons and related proteins regulate the morphology of the endoplasmic reticulum.
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