Samuel Mitja Rapoport (27 November 1912 – 7 July 2004) was a Ukrainian-born German university professor of biochemistry in East Germany.

In 1950, as a result of an investigation of un-American activities, he was offered a professorship in East Berlin.

Rapoport was born in Volhynia near the Russian-Austrian border in what is now the Ukraine and his family resided there from 1912 to 1916.

His family left Odessa for Vienna, Austria in 1920.

In 1933 he attended the Institute for Medical Chemistry and worked on the analysis of amino acids in the blood serum.

When the annexation of Austria by Nazi-Germany was imminent, he received a scholarship for scientific studies and clinical work at the Children's Hospital Research Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1938.

In 1944 while in Cincinnati he met the German emigrant and physician Ingeborg Syllm, they married in 1946.

Ingeborg Syllm, born in 1912 in Cameroon was the daughter of a Protestant couple, she had studied medicine in Hamburg, and fled to the US in September 1938.

During a congress of pediatricians in Switzerland in 1950 he received information that he was a target of the anticommunist McCarthy commission.

In 1951 the East German Humboldt University in East Berlin offered Rapoport the professorship and directorship of the Institute for Physiological Chemistry at the Charité Hospital.

When in 1982 the committee "Physicians of GDR for prevention of nuclear war" was founded, Rapoport was elected the chairman.

She worked from 1952 as pediatrician in Berlin.

In 1964 she became a professor and had the professorship for neonatology of the Charité Hospital from 1969 to 1973.

The children of Samuel and Ingeborg Rapoport are the biochemist Tom, who up to 1995 worked at the Max-Delbrück-Centrum in Berlin, and now is at Harvard University, the mathematician Michael who works at the University of Bonn.

In May 2015, Ingeborg Rapoport defended a doctoral dissertation about diphtheria that she submitted in 1938 to the University of Hamburg.

His research was supported by Paul Hoxworth, who founded in 1938 one of the first United States blood banks in Cincinnati.

In 1948, together with two other American physicians he reported his results about the Ekiri disease in Japan.

In 1952 Rapoport founded at the Berlin Charité a Biochemical Institute.

Up to 1996 Rapoport published or was a participant in 666 scientific works.

In 1969 he became a member of the Academy of Science of the German Democratic Republic.

Meine ersten drei Leben – die Erinnerungen von Ingeborg Rapoport, 2002 NORA-Verlag Rapoport, S.M.: