Reinhart Heinrich (24 April 1946 – 23 October 2006) was a German biophysicist. He was professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and best known as one of the founders, with Tom Rapoport, of metabolic control theory in parallel with similar ideas developed at about the same time by Henrik Kacser and Jim Burns. 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 (Jenseits von Babel) and several works of lyric poetry for which he received the Brigitte Reimann Prize. Among his services to the scientific community, Reinhart was assoc