Maurice M. Rapport

Maurice Rapoport was born on September 23, 1919, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His mother changed the spelling of the family name to Rapport. His father was a furrier from Russia who left the family when Rapport was a small child. Rapport graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, New York and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the City College of New York in 1940. He obtained his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1946 from California Institute of Technology. ==Career==

Serotonin research In 1946, Maurice Rapport began working in the Cleveland Clinic Foundation which was directed by Irvine H. Page. Since the 1860s, we had known of a substance in the serum of blood vessels that promotes clotting. In a paper published in 1948, they gave it a name: serotonin, derived from “serum” and “tonic”. Serotonin was found to be the same substance that Dr. Vittorio Erspamer had been studying since the 1930s called “enteramine”. Enteramine had a substantial place in scientific literature due to Erspamer's research into its role in smooth muscle constriction and intestinal tracts. In 1968, Rapport returned to Columbia University as chief of pharmacology and professor of biochemistry. The next year, he became the chief of the new neuroscience division which combined the chemistry, pharmacology, and bacteriology divisions. He retired in 1986 and remained in the neurology department of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as a visiting professor. ==Awards and honors==

Because of this work with serotonin, Rapport was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship in 1952 to study with Dr. Daniel Bovet, who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in pharmacology. ==References==