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Education and early life

Eigen was born on 9 May 1927 in Bochum,⁴⁵ the son of Ernst and Hedwig (Feld) Eigen, a chamber musician.⁶ As a child he developed a deep passion for music, and studied piano.⁷

World War II interrupted his formal education. At age fifteen he was drafted into service in a German antiaircraft unit. He was captured by the Americans toward the end of the war.⁸ He managed to escape (he said later that escape was relatively easy),⁹ and walked hundreds of miles across defeated Germany, arriving in Göttingen in 1945. He lacked the necessary documentation for acceptance to university,¹⁰ but was admitted after he demonstrated his knowledge in an exam. He entered the university's first postwar class.

Eigen desired to study physics, but since returning soldiers who were enrolled previously received priority, he enrolled in Geophysics. He earned an undergraduate degree and began graduate study in natural sciences. One of his advisors was Werner Heisenberg, the noted proponent of the uncertainty principle.¹¹ He received his doctorate in 1951.

Career and research

Eigen received his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen in 1951 under supervision of Arnold Eucken.¹² In 1964 he presented the results of his research at a meeting of the Faraday Society in London. His findings demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to determine the rates of chemical reactions that occurred during time intervals as brief as a nanosecond.

Beginning in 1953 Eigen worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen, becoming its director in 1964 and joining it with the Max Planck Institute for Spectroscopy to become the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. He was an honorary professor of the Braunschweig University of Technology. From 1982 to 1993, Eigen was president of the German National Merit Foundation. Eigen was a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.¹³¹⁴

In 1967, Eigen was awarded, along with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish¹⁵ and George Porter,¹⁶ the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were cited for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions induced in response to very short pulses of energy.

In addition, Eigen's name is linked with the theory of quasispecies, the error threshold, error catastrophe, Eigen's paradox, and the chemical hypercycle, the cyclic linkage of reaction cycles as an explanation for the self-organization of prebiotic systems, which he described with Peter Schuster in 1977.^17181920

Eigen founded two biotechnology companies, Evotec and Direvo.²¹

In 1981, Eigen became a founding member of the World Cultural Council.²²

Eigen was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences even though he was an atheist.²³ He died on 6 February 2019 at the age of 91.^24252627

Personal life

Eigen was married to Elfriede Müller.²⁸ The union produced two children, a boy and a girl.²⁹ He later married Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch, a longtime scientific partner.³⁰

Honours and awards

Eigen won numerous awards for his research including:

• Otto Hahn Prize (1962)³¹
• Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964)³²
• Elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (1966)³³
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1967), shared with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, for his studies on the kinetics of extremely fast running chemical reactions with relaxation methods³⁴
• Elected a member of the American Philosophical Society (1968)³⁵
• Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Sciences) (1976)³⁶
• Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1973³⁷
• Pour le Mérite (1973)³⁸
• Faraday Lectureship Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1977³⁹
• Austrian Decoration for Science and Art⁴⁰
• Lower Saxony State Prize for Science (1980)⁴¹
• Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (1992)⁴²
• Helmholtz Medal (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994)⁴³
• Max Planck Research Award (1994), jointly with Rudolf Rigler of the Karolinska Institute⁴⁴
• Honorary member of the Ruhr University Bochum (2001)⁴⁵
• Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore (2005)⁴⁶
• Wilhelm Exner Medal (2011)⁴⁷

Honorary doctorates

He received 15 honorary doctorates.⁴⁸

• Honorary Professor, Technical University of Braunschweig (1965)⁴⁹
• Honorary doctorate from Harvard University (1966)⁵⁰
• Honorary doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis (1966)⁵¹
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago (1966)⁵²
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham (1968)⁵³
• Honorary Professor, University of Göttingen (1971)⁵⁴
• Honorary doctorate from Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1973)⁵⁵
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Hull (1976)⁵⁶
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Bristol (1978)⁵⁷
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Debrecen (1982)⁵⁸
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge (1982)⁵⁹
• Honorary doctorate from Technical University of Munich (1983)⁶⁰
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Bielefeld (1985)⁶¹
• Honorary doctorate from Utah State University (1990)⁶²
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Alicante (1990)⁶³
• Honorary doctorate from the University of Coimbra, Portugal (2007)⁶⁴
• Honorary Degree, Scripps Institute of Research (2011)⁶⁵

Bibliography

• Eigen, Manfred (2013). From strange simplicity to complex familiarity : a treatise on matter, information, life and thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-857021-9. OCLC 867631103.
• Eigen, Manfred (1971). "Selforganization of matter and the evolution of biological macromolecules". Die Naturwissenschaften. 58 (10). Springer Science and Business Media LLC: 465–523. Bibcode:1971NW.....58..465E. doi:10.1007/bf00623322. ISSN 0028-1042. PMID 4942363. S2CID 38296619.
• Eigen, Manfred (1993). Laws of the game : how the principles of nature govern chance. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02566-5. OCLC 25787606.
• Manfred Eigen tells his life story at Web of Stories (video)
• Interview with Manfred Eigen by Harry Kroto, NL Freeview video provided by the Vega Science Trust.
• "Falls ein Gott die Naturgesetze erschuf, so erschuf er auch das Leben durch Evolution" (in German) Interview with Manfred Eigen from 2004, Archive

Further reading

Obituaries

• Slotnik, Daniel E. (14 February 2019). "Nobel winner put a clock to chemicals". Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Honolulu. p. B6. Retrieved 20 May 2020 – via Newspapers.com.
• Weil, Martin (12 February 2019). "Manfred Eigen, 91, shared '67 Nobel Prize in chemistry". The Boston Globe. Boston. p. C9. Retrieved 20 May 2020 – via Newspapers.com.

External links

• "The institute congratulates Manfred Eigen on his 90th birthday!" Archived 19 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine at mpibpc.mpg.de
• Manfred Eigen – Early childhood recollections about music on YouTube
• Manfred Eigen on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1967 Immeasurably Fast Reactions

References

1. Weisskopf, V. F.; Eyring, H.; Eyring, E. M. (1967), "Nobel Prizes: 4 named for international award (Hans Bethe, Manfred Eigen, R.G. Norrish, George Porter)", Science, vol. 158, no. 3802 (published 10 November 1967), pp. 745–8, Bibcode:1967Sci...158..745W, doi:10.1126/science.158.3802.745, PMID 4860395 /wiki/Science_(journal) ↩

2. Winkler-Oswatitsch, R. (1987), "Manfred Eigen. Scientist and musician", Biophys. Chem., vol. 26, no. 2–3 (published 9 May 1987), pp. 109–15, doi:10.1016/0301-4622(87)80015-7, PMID 3300805 /wiki/Doi_(identifier) ↩

3. Weil, Martin (12 February 2019). "Obituaries: Manfred Eigen". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 12 February 2019. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2019/02/11/manfred-eigen-nobel-winning-chemist-who-clocked-speeds-fast-reactions/wgrBmaAjTp07e0aZZNF8OL/story.html?et_rid=25832560&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter ↩

4. "Manfred Eigen Festschrift: special issue dedicated to Professor Manfred Eigen on the occasion of his 60th birthday", Biophys. Chem., vol. 26, no. 2–3 (published 9 May 1987), pp. 101–390, 1987, PMID 3300802 /wiki/PMID_(identifier) ↩

5. Schlögl, R. W. (1997), "To Manfred Eigen on his 70th birthday", Biophys. Chem., vol. 66, no. 2–3 (published 30 June 1997), pp. 71–3, doi:10.1016/S0301-4622(97)00075-6, PMID 17029872 /wiki/Doi_(identifier) ↩

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8. "Manfred Eigen – Web of Stories". Web of Stories. Retrieved 9 February 2025. https://www.webofstories.com/playAll/manfred.eigen?sId=11026 ↩

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15. Dainton, F.; Thrush, B. A. (1981). "Ronald George Wreyford Norrish. 9 November 1897-7 June 1978". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 27: 379–424. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1981.0016. ISSN 0080-4606. S2CID 72584163. https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frsbm.1981.0016 ↩

16. Fleming, G. R.; Phillips, D. (2004). "George Porter KT OM, Lord Porter of Luddenham. 6 December 1920 – 31 August 2002: Elected F.R.S. 1960". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 50: 257–283. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2004.0017. ISSN 0080-4606. https://doi.org/10.1098%2Frsbm.2004.0017 ↩

17. Eigen & Schuster (1977) The Hypercycle. A Principle of Natural Self-Organisation. Part A: Emergence of the Hypercycle. Naturwissenschaften Vol. 64, pp. 541–565. https://unterlagen.site/document/eigen1977naturwissenschaften64.html ↩

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