Manfred Eigen

Manfred Eigen (born 9 May 1927) is a German biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions.

Eigen was drafted into the German Army at 15 serving in an anti-aircraft unit and captured by the Russians at the end of the Second World War. He escaped captivity and walked to Göttingen where he joined the first post-war cohort of students even though he never finished his high school qualifications.

Eigen received his Ph.D. at the University of Göttingen and is a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. He is an honorary professor of the Braunschweig University of Technology. From 1982 to 1993, Eigen was president of the German National Merit Foundation. Eigen is currently a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

In 1967, Eigen was awarded, along with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were distinguished 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 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. He founded two biotechnology companies, Evotec and Direvo.

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

Eigen is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences even though he is an atheist.

Eigen has won numerous awards for his research including:

• Otto Hahn Prize (1962)
• 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 methods
• Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Sciences) (1976)
• Corresponding Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (1972)
• Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1973
• Faraday Lectureship Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1977
• Patron of the annual XLAB Science Festival in Göttingen
• Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
• Lower Saxony State Prize for Science (1980)
• Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (1992)
• Helmholtz Medal (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994)
• Max Planck Research Award (1994), jointly with Rudolf Rigler of the Karolinska Institute
• Honorary member of the Ruhr University Bochum (2001)
• Honorary doctorate from Harvard University
• Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore (2005)
• Wilhelm Exner Medal (2011).

• "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1967 – Nobelprize.org". Retrieved 2 April 2013. 
• Editor, ÖGV. (2015). Wilhelm Exner Medal. Austrian Trade Association. ÖGV. Austria.