Manfred Eigen Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on Manfred Eigen

Manfred Eigen shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1967 with George Porter and Ronald G. W. Norrish for their combined work on fast chemical reactions. Whereas previously scientists had no means of calculating the rates of these reactions, Eigen discovered that high-frequency sound waves could be used to create pulses of energy in a chemical system. Observing the change as the system returned to a state of equilibrium enabled him to measure rates of reactions that lasted only a billionth of a second. Most of his long career has been spent at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen.

Eigen was born in the town of Bochum in the Ruhr region of Germany on May 9, 1927, to Ernst Eigen and Hedwig Feld Eigen. He served briefly with an army anti-aircraft artillery unit at the end of World War II, then returned to the University of Göttingen (where he had begun his education), earning his doctorate in 1951.

For several years Eigen worked as a research assistant at the University of Göttingen, and then he joined the staff at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry. In 1958 he was appointed a research fellow at the institute, and in 1962 he became head of the department of biochemical kinetics. In 1964 he was made the director.

Eigen discovered in his early research that the reason sound waves are absorbed by seawater more quickly than by water is that they disrupt the charged particles of magnesium sulfate, small amounts of which are dissolved in seawater. The sound wave causes the loss of a small amount of energy. This discovery led Eigen to use high-frequency sound waves to produce disturbances in a chemical system in order to measure rates of chemical processes that had not been measured before. He was able to study chemical reactions measuring from a thousandth to a billionth of a second. This technique is called a relaxation technique because it measures a new state of equilibrium in a chemical system.

Eigen's interest in fast chemical reactions is related to his interest in biology. He concentrated his research on extremely rapid biochemical body reactions in an effort to discover how molecules formed and evolved into the first forms of life. Basically, his theory is built on the premise that the first organisms evolved from a chance set of circumstances coming together. In Laws of the Game , a book that he coauthored with his associate Ruthild Winkler, Eigen explores how the principles of nature govern chance, which, along with necessity, cause all events. The authors developed their models from general science, philosophy, sociology, and aesthetics, as well as from biology. The models are used to explore complex scientific concepts. Eigen and Winkler saw the play of games as being basic to both the organization of the physical world and to human behavior.

Eigen's relaxation techniques have been used to study enzyme-catalyzed reactions and the coding of biological information. During the 1970s he worked on hypercycles (the self-organization of nucleic acids into complex structures and their interaction with proteins). Eigen's work has been extremely valuable in many other areas of scientific investigation; it has been used in areas such as radiation chemistry and enzyme kinetics, where the sequence of processes becomes converted into products.

Much of Eigen's research is considered by his colleagues to be groundbreaking, since he opened new areas of application for relaxation techniques. He has received wide recognition for his work, winning a number of important awards, including the Otto Hahn Prize from the German Physical Society in 1962, the Linus Pauling Medal of the American Chemical Society in 1967, and the Faraday Medal of the British Chemical Society in 1977, and receiving honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the U.S. He has written more than 100 papers and several books, and has traveled and lectured widely.