was born in 1903 in Lithuania. There he first received Jewish traditional education and later attended a general high school. In 1922 he moved to Germany and studied chemistry at the University of Berlin. Since that time he has been particularly attracted by chemical problems of medical significance -he adhered always to this interest. His Ph.D. thesis was carried out under the guidance of Prof. K.W. Rosenmund, a representative of the classical German school of Organic Chemistry. When Rosenmund received the Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the University of Kiel, Shapiro followed his teacher and the Ph.D. was awarded to him there in 1972. He continued his research work for an additional two years in Rosenmund's laboratory. From 1930 on, Shapiro worked in the Pharmaceutical Industry, until 1933 in Germany and afterwards in Palestine -now Israel, where he immigrated after Hitler came to power. At the beginning of the Second World War Dr. Sh. submitted to Dr. Chaim Weizmann, later First President of the State of Israel, but at that time Head of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute (later Weizmann Institute), a program for manufacturing synthetic drugs at the Institute, which should meet the urgent need of the British Army stationed in the Middle East. After some hesitation Dr. Weizmann accepted Shapiro's proposal. He was invited to develop, together with several other members of the Institute, processes for the synthesis of certain drugs and to develop these processes from the laboratory stage to the industrial scale.
After World War II ended, Shapiro started his scientific work in preparative chemistry, first in various areas of Organic Chemistry, according to the trends of research developed at the Institute. During a sabbatical leave which he spent in 1952 with Prof. H.E. Carter at the University of Illinois he shifted to the chemistry of sphingolipids, which was to become the major theme in his scientific career. This group of compounds is characterized by the presence of a large number of different functional groups responsible for the unusual chemical and physical behaviour of the sphingolipids. Therefore the greatest experimental difficulties are encountered in synthetic work with this group of compounds. Synthetic sphingolipids must be prepared in order to elucidate the obscure role which these compounds play in the living cell. The interesting chemistry and the biological importance of the sphingolipids attracted Shapiro and he devoted his profound knowledge and experimental skill to synthetic work in this area.
The main achievements of Shapiro's synthetic work include the following: The way for the total synthesis of sphingosine, the long chain amino alcohol (D-erythro-* For references see the list of publications of Prof. D. Shapiro.