Starzl, TE

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_OBITUARY Felix T. Rapaport, MD To UNDERSTAND Felix Rapaport, a man who worked until the day of his death-April 12, 2001-from coronary artery disease, one must know the child. Felix was a flower blown by the winds of the most ter-rible and magical century in human his-tory. His nomadic life began idylli-cally on September 27,1929 . Pursued by the threat of genocide, his family moved from Munich to Paris in 1935. When France fell to the Germans, the Rapaport family found itself literally at sea, unable to find a port of disembar-kation until the Dominican Republic opened its doors. Displaying a quality of character that would sustain him throughout life, Felix interpreted the stay in Central America as a fortunate opportunity to learn his third lan-guage. The Rapaport journey then turned north to New York City, Stuyve-sant High School, and graduation magna cum laude from New York Uni-versity (NYU) undergraduate school (1951) and medical school (1954). As a fourth-year medical student, Rapaport nearly died of hepatitis . As he had done before, Rapaport turned po-tential tragedy into triumph, aided by Bellevue Hospital plastic surgeon John Converse, who ignited Rapaport's in-terest in the still-embryonic field of transplantation. Over the next de-cade, their joint activities with the New York Academy of Sciences established the mold from which the Transplanta-tion Society was struck. Fully recov-ered from the hepatitis, Rapaport served as an officer in the US Navy and began his long odyssey as a peerless educa-tor, scientist, and transplant surgeon. After training in the Department of Sur-3032 lAMA, June 20, 200 I-Vol 285, No. 23 gery at NYU (1958-1962) and serving as a faculty member (1963-1977), he founded the transplantation program at Stony Brook University Hospital (Long Island) and sustained it until his retire-ment in 1999. In 1998, Felix Rapaport won the Medawar Prize, the highest distinc-tion of the international Transplanta-tion SOCiety, His receipt of the prize, named for Sir Peter Medawar, the fa-ther of modem transplantation immu-nology, had special meaning because Felix was himself a professional father of sorts. He served the Transplanta-tion Society as Founding Secretary, Past President, and continuous council member for 35 years and as founder and editor for 33 years of the journal Trans-plantation Proceedings . Rapaport's influence on transplan-tation stemmed equally from his sci-entific contributions. Between 1958 and 1962, he reported the first systematic study of skin allograft rejection in hu-mans, which suggested the possible ex-istence of tissue types in man, These studies in New York and subsequent ones in Paris with Jean Dausset culmi-nated in definition of the dog (DLA) and human (HU) leukocyte antigen sys-tem and defined" the laws of transplan-tation in both species." When George D, Snell, Jean Dausset, and Baruch Benacerraf received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1980, Dausset remarked that equal credit for his discovery of hu-man tissue antigens should go to Rapaport. Rapaport's other first-time observations included the tolerogenic qualities of organ allografts; the loss of cellular immunity with malignant dis-ease, severe trauma, and burns; the ge-netic control and sex linkage of host re-sistance to thermal and radiation injury; and cross-reactivity between bacterial and histocompatibility antigens. Although full of honors at the end, Felix Rapaport considered that his most successful transplantation procedures consisted of the donation of half of their genes to 5 vital members of the next generation to whom the other half was given by Margaret, his equal partner in an enduring marriage. The children and Margaret survive him. Thomas E. Starzl, MD, PhD University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Pittsburgh, Pa Obituaries Section Editor: Roxanne K. Young, Asso-ciate Editor. 

Obituary: Felix T. Rapaport

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Obituary: Felix T. Rapaport

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