Efraim Racker was born in Neu Sandez, Poland and grew up in Vienna, Austria where he received his medical degree in 1938. A Jew, he fled to England, beginning his research activities in the lab of Dr. Quastel and pursuing his interest in psychiatry at the Cardiff City Mental Hospital. He came to the U.S. in 1941, and researched the effects of the polio virus on the brain at the University of Minnesota. From 1942 to 1944 he was a resident in pneumonia at Harlem Hospital in New York. In 1944 he joined the Microbiology Dept. of New York University College of Medicine, where he taught until 1952. He married Franziska Weiss in 1945 and became Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Yale University in 1952. From 1954 to 1966, he was chief of the Biochemistry Dept. at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York and Professor of Microbiology at New York University. In 1966 he became the Albert Einstein Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Cornell University where he remained active until his death in 1991. He was chairman of the the department from 1966 to 1970. He made contributions in many areas of biochemistry and medical research and authored many textbooks and scientific publications. In his early work, he studied pathways of carbohydrate metabolism and the enzymes catalyzing ATP syntheses in oxidative phophorylation. His recent work was on intracellular signaling involving oncogenes, growth factor receptors, and protein kinases in cancer and other diseases. He was a member of the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and numerous other scientific organizations. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1976. He also was a serious painter and had servaeral large exhibitions of his work, the proceeds of which went to the Cornell Cancer Fund.