RACKER, EFRAIM

RACKER, EFRAIM (1913–1991), U.S. biochemist Racker was born in Neu Sandez, Poland, and, after a brief period in the Vienna Academy of Art studied at the University of Vienna, where he received his M.D. in 1938. However, art remained a lifelong passion and later in life he sold his own brilliant acrylics to benefit the fund he had established to help needy students. He left Austria after Nazi occupation for Great Britain, where his interest in psychiatry led him to work on the metabolism of the brain at the Cardiff City Mental Hospital. The general ignorance of normal cell metabolism motivated his change from physician to biochemist after he moved to New York University Medical School in 1944 and Yale Medical School in 1952. In 1954–66 he was head of the Nutrition and Physiology Department at the Public Health Research Institute, New York City, before moving to Cornell University, where he became the Albert Einstein Professor of Biochemistry and remained a working scientist until his death. His research interests concerned photosynthesis and energy production with the major discovery that oxidative phosphorylation is mediated by a transmembrane proton gradient. His world leadership in this field was recognized by many honors, including the National Medal of Science (1976), the Gairdner Award (1980), and the Harvey Prize of the Israel Technion (1980). (Michael Denman (2nd ed.)