Robert S. de Ropp

Robert Sylvester de Ropp (1913–1987) was an English biochemist and a researcher and academic in that field. After retiring from biochemistry, he brought other long-time personal interests to the fore, becoming a prominent author in the fields of human potentials and the search for spiritual enlightenment.

Ropp was born in Bath, England, in 1913, the son of William de Ropp (originally Wilhelm von der Ropp) by his marriage to Ruth Fisher. The Ropp family had been land-owning barons in Lithuania. William was of Teutonic and Cossack descent, and although entitled to use the title of “Baron”, was perpetually in shaky financial circumstances. He had settled in England in 1910 and become naturalised in 1913. Ropp's mother, Ruth, was a daughter of Albert Bulteel Fisher, whose brother was the academic historian Herbert William Fisher. Ruth de Ropp died in the 1918 flu pandemic. Robert de Ropp had also contracted the flu during the pandemic, and by the time he fully recovered from its ravages he was seven years old.

Much later in Robert's life, one of his mother's cousins, Adeline (the first wife of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams) was to figure quite importantly in his development.

After Ropp's recovery from the flu, his father sent him as a boarder to a preparatory school, and during the school holidays he lived with various relations on his mother's side, including an aunt in Leicestershire and a great aunt at Salisbury. This institution, Cheam School, offered the then-conventional curriculum of the Greek and Latin classics, English literature, and Muscular Christianity. Although subsequently questioning the premises of formal religion, Ropp had his first spiritual experience during his confirmation.

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