The oldest candidate of Sciences
102-year-old German woman defended her dissertation written in 1938
News from The Wall Street Journal: Ingeborg Rapoport to Become Oldest Recipient of Doctorate After Nazi Injustice is Righted
102-year-old pediatrician-neonatologist Ingeborg Rapoport (Ingeborg Rapoport) has been waiting for the defense of her doctoral dissertation for 77 years.
Rapoport first presented her scientific work to the dissertation council of the University of Hamburg in 1938, five years after Hitler came to power. The topic of her dissertation was diphtheria, an infectious disease that in the middle of the XX century was one of the main causes of infant mortality in the USA and Europe. As Rapoport recalls, her supervisor, a professor who was a member of the NSDAP, praised her work, but it did not help her to defend her thesis.
The Scientific Council cited a "racial reason" for the refusal: Rapoport's mother was Jewish. "My career just collapsed. It was a shame for science and a shame for Germany," Rapoport said. In the same year, she emigrated to the United States without having any savings. In search of work, the girl applied to dozens of medical schools, but was accepted only to the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania.
In 1946, she married an Austrian doctor of Jewish descent, with whom she gave birth to four children. A few years later, the family moved to East Germany, where Rapoport founded the country's first neonatology clinic in the early 2000s. Later, a colleague of her son, also a doctor, told a story about an unrecognized work to the dean of the Medical faculty of the University of Hamburg, Uwe Koch-Gromus. Koch-Gromus expressed a desire to award Rapoport a doctorate, but the university's law department informed him that a woman could only apply for an honorary degree. However, Koch-Gromus and Rapoport have jointly solved the bureaucratic problems that have arisen over the years. This implied, in particular, a literary review of the works on diphtheria that had appeared over 70 years.
Due to vision problems, Rapoport could not use a computer or read, so her family and colleagues retold modern scientific literature to her over the phone. The defense itself took place in the form of a 45-minute conversation between three representatives of the scientific council and Rapoport at her home. "It was a very revealing test. Despite her age, she coped with the task perfectly," Koch-Gromus believes. Thus, Rapoport became the oldest person in the world who successfully defended his dissertation.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru18.05.2015