Reinhart Heinrich

Who was Reinhart Heinrich?

Reinhart Heinrich was a German biophysicist. He was professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and best known as a founder of metabolic control theory. Among his services to the scientific community, Reinhart was associate editor of PLoS Computational Biology. His far-reaching theoretical work on metabolism, signal transduction, and other cellular processes has made him one of the most influential forerunners of present-day systems biology. Reinhart's many talents made him appear as a modern Renaissance man. He played the violin, and published an autobiographic novel and several works of lyric poetry for which he received the Brigitte Reimann Prize.

Reinhart Heinrich was born in Dresden and lived at first in the Soviet Union where his father - a German aircraft constructor - was taken after the Second World War to work. Having been educated as a theoretical physicist at Dresden University of Technology in East Germany, Reinhart conducted his postdoctoral research in the early 1970s at the Charité's Institute of Biochemistry in East Berlin. He could not fail to notice the absence of mathematical theory from cell biology as compared with other natural sciences.