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

Of Jewish descent and a committed communist, he fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and moved to the United States.

Already sympathetic to left-wing views, he joined the Communist Party out of protest against the rise of fascism.

His own painful experiences of war, injustice, banishment, political and racial persecution brought him to a socialist world-view up to his end of life.

He was directed by a deep humanity, he loved reasoning and discussing, he had a great inquiring mind and he had the ability to connect theoretical knowledge, philosophical views and practical realization.

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.

He worked to prolong the shelf life of blood altering conservation media in order to preserve the energy metabolism of erythrocytes.

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.

Despite his gratitude towards the United States, which had offered him citizenship and work, Rapoport continued to be politically active as a member of the Communist Party.

Rapoport rejected a job offer by the Weizmann Institute in Israel on the grounds of his anti-Zionist beliefs.

After the unification of Germany he became president of the newly founded Leibniz-Societät, which consisted of former members of the disbanded Academy of Sciences of the GDR.

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

Due to his works the ACD-medium was established, the pH-environment, the storage temperature and the processing were improved.

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