Rapoport, Henry

Professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biographical Information

Henry Rapoport was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 16, 1918. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. in chemistry in 1936 and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1943. After graduation, Rapoport worked for the Heyden Chemical Corporation, where he researched the isolation, structure elucidation, and synthesis of penicillin. He left Heyden in 1945 after receiving a National Research Council Fellowship to study the synthesis of morphine derivatives at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

In 1946, Rapoport was appointed Instructor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1948, Associate Professor in 1953, and finally to Professor in 1957. While at Berkeley, Rapoport taught undergraduate chemistry courses required for students in the premedical and Life Sciences majors, as well as graduate level courses in natural products chemistry. Rapoport trained over 300 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry research over his 55 years of service to the university. In over 400 research projects, Rapoport and his laboratory teams made significant contributions in the chemistry of morphinan alkaloids, paralytic shellfish poison (called saxitoxin), heterocyclic compounds, biological pigments, antibiotics, and anti-tumor compounds.

In addition to teaching, Rapoport co-authored, along with James Cason, a book entitled Laboratory Text in Organic Chemistry, which was used in college and university laboratory classes for over 30 years. Over the course of his career, he published over 400 articles, continuing to write well after his retirement from the university.

Rapoport worked as a consultant in the private sector, serving many well-known medicinal research laboratories, including Dupont Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and MitoKor. In the 1970s, Rapoport and his colleague John Hearst developed psoralens, natural products that can be used for the deactivation of viruses. This research led to the formation of the Cerus Corporation.

Rapoport served as Associate Editor of The Journal of Organic Chemistry and was a member of the Medicinal Chemistry Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. Among the numerous awards and fellowships he received during his career were a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 and the Research Achievement Award in Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry from the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1972. Professor Rapoport was also made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Professor Rapoport retired from UC Berkeley in 1989 and was awarded the Berkeley Citation in 1997. He died on March 6, 2002 in Oakland, California.