Calming chemical for the brain
September 11th 2011 19:59
MAURICE M. Rapport, a biochemist who helped isolate and name the neurotransmitter serotonin, which plays a role in regulating mood and mental states, has died in Durham, North Carolina. He was 91.
He was also first to describe its molecular structure, a development that led to the creation of a wide variety of psychiatric and other drugs.
In the 1940s, Rapport was a freshly minted biochemist from the California Institute of Technology when he began working at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation with Irvine Page, a leading specialist in high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.
Scientists had known since the 1860s of a substance in the serum released during clotting that constricts blood vessels by acting on the smooth muscles of the blood-vessel walls. In the 20th century, researchers pinpointed its source in blood platelets, but its identity remained a mystery.
Rapport, working with Page and Arda Green, isolated the substance and, in a paper published in 1948, gave it a name: serotonin, derived from ''serum'' and ''tonic''.
On his own, Rapport identified the structure of serotonin as 5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT, as it is called by pharmacologists. It is also referred to as ''the calming chemical''. Rapport's findings, published in 1949, made it possible for commercial laboratories to synthesise serotonin and study its properties as a neurotransmitter. More than 90,000 scientific papers have been published on 5-HT, and the Serotonin Club, a professional organisation, regularly holds conferences to report on research in the field.
Initially, researchers focused on agents to block serotonin, which, by constricting blood vessels, causes blood pressure to rise. After researchers discovered its presence in the brain, and its chemical similarity to LSD, which mimics serotonin in the brain, they began focusing on serotonin's role in regulating mood and mental functioning.
At a time when little was known about the way the brain functioned, and psychoanalysis was the explanatory model for behaviour, Rapport's discovery became a building block for understanding ''the regulation of mood, sleep, appetite, vomiting, sexuality, memory and learning, temperature regulation, cardiovascular function, and endocrine regulation''.
Further, low levels of serotonin were associated with migraines, bipolar disorders, apathy, fear, feelings of worthlessness, insomnia, fatigue, anxiety, and depression.
This new understanding of the structure and functioning of serotonin led to a changing view of mental disorders as chemical imbalances and opened the way for the development of antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs that act on 5-HT, as well as drugs for treating cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disease.
He was born Maurice Rapoport in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His father, a furrier who had emigrated from Russia, left the family when his son was a small child. The boy's mother changed the spelling of the family name, and he later adopted the middle initial ''M'', although it did not stand for anything.
After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from City College in 1940, and a doctorate in organic chemistry from Cal Tech in 1946.
For his work on serotonin he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1952 to study with Dr Daniel Bovet, later a Nobel prize winner for his work in pharmacology, at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome.
After doing research in biochemistry at Columbia University, immunology at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and biochemistry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Rapport joined the staff of the New York Psychiatric Institute, where he created the division of neuroscience by combining the old divisions of chemistry, pharmacology and bacteriology. He also held the post of professor of biochemistry at Columbia's college of physicians and surgeons.
Rapport retired in 1986 and was a visiting professor in the neurology department of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine until his death.
He did important research on cancer, cardiovascular disease, connective-tissue disease and demyelinating diseases, a type of nervous-system disorder that includes multiple sclerosis.
One productive area of his research focused on the immunological activity of lipids found in the nervous system, notably cytolipin H, which he isolated from human cancer tissue in 1958. He also identified the lipid galactocerebroside as the substance responsible for producing antigens specific to the brain, a finding that led to a better understanding of the immune system.
Rapport's wife, Edith, died in 1988, and he lived in New York with his long-time companion, Nancy Reich, until failing health took him to live with his daughter, Erica, in Durham, in July. They survive him, as do his son, Ezra, five grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.
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