Lynn Helena Caporale Papers

Lynn Helena Caporale is an American biochemist and science consultant. Caporale earned her B.S. in Chemistry from the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (1967) and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley (1973). After earning her Ph.D., she held post doctoral positions at the New York University Medical Center, the Memorial Sloane-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, and Rockefeller University. From 1978 to 1984, she served as Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, where she designed selective inhibitors of complement system enzymes involved in inflammation.

From 1984 to 1994, Caporale worked at Merck & Company, Incorporated, where she served as Senior Director and Scientific Liaison. At Merck, she was responsible for identifying, tracking, and acquiring breakthrough therapeutic agents. While at Merck, she collaborated with renowned German-American chemist Ralph F. Hirschmann, who oversaw the first organic synthesis of the enzyme ribonuclease and played a key role in developing several other pharmaceutical products for the firm, including Ivermectin, Mevacor, and Primaxin.

After leaving Merck, Caporale served as Strategic Advisor to several biotechnology and venture capital firms (1995-2002). From 2004 to 2009, she worked at Columbia University, where she held the positions of Executive Director of Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2004-2005), Associate Director of Judith P. Sulzberger Genome Center (2005-2008), and Project Specialist at the Office of the Vice Dean for Research (2009). Caporale is currently a science consultant to pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms (2010-Present). She is also the author of three books: Darwin in the Genome: Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolutions (2003), Effects of Genome Structure and Sequence on Variation and Evolution (2012), and The Implicit Genome (2023).