Manfred Eigen
Eigen, Manfred (1927-) is a German chemist who shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in chemistry with British chemists Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and Sir George Porter for developing techniques to measure rapid chemical reactions.
Eigen was born May 9, 1927, in the town of Bochum in the Ruhr region of Germany. His parents were Ernst and Hedwig Eigen. The elder Eigen was a chamber musician. Eigen received his early schooling at the Bochum Humanistic Gymnasium. He then went on to the University of Göttingen. His education was interrupted when he was drafted into military service with an antiaircraft artillery unit. He later returned to the University of Göttingen and obtained his doctorate in natural science in 1951. He remained at Göttingen and worked as a research assistant for the next two years. He then transferred to the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry, also in Göttingen, and in 1958 became a research fellow. In 1962, he was promoted to head of the department of biochemical kinetics. Two years later, he became the director of the institute.
In 1954, Eigen began using a method called the relaxation techniques to study extremely fast chemical reactions. These techniques involved disturbing a substance with a sudden burst of energy, such as a pulse of high-frequency sound waves, and then measuring the time it takes the substance to return to its normal state of equilibrium. These reactions lasted only 1/1,000 to 1/1,000,000,000 of a second. This technique was called the relaxation technique in reference to the time it takes to bring the system back to equilibrium. Before Eigen's work came about, scientists had no way of calculating the rates of these reactions. It was for this work that he shared the Nobel Prize. Eigen later used his relaxation techniques to study complex biochemical reactions.
Eigen began his work with fast chemical reactions in the 1950's. Later, he focused his research on figuring out how molecules formed and evolved into the first forms of life on the earth. He built a theory on the idea that the first life forms evolved from a chance set of circumstances that all took place at the same time. He proposed that cycles of chemical reactions might have occurred, one reproducing nucleic acids and one reproducing proteins. The nucleic acids contained information to form life but had a limited chemical function, and the proteins ensured chemical function and reproduction of the information contained in the nucleic acids. And hence, life arose from these combinations. He also proposed that eventually a number of the nucleic acid cycles and proteins would have come to coexist and form a “hypercycle.” By natural selection, the best hypercycle would have eventually caused the first organism to evolve.
Eigen was coauthor of a book, Laws of the Game (1981), which proposed several theories. In the book, he and coauthor Ruthild Winkler explored how elements of chance govern nature. The two believed that chance and necessity underlie all events. To explain their theories, they used ideas from many fields of study, including general science, philosophy, sociology, biology, and aesthetics. Eigen and Winkler presented several games as examples to illustrate their ideas. Scientists have used Eigen's relaxation techniques to study enzyme-catalyzed reactions and the coding of biological information.
Eigen has received many awards for his work. He won the Otto Hahn Prize for chemistry and physics in 1962. In 1967, he was the recipient of the Linus Pauling Medal of the American Chemical Society. And, in 1977, he won the Faraday Medal of the Royal Society. He has received honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the United States. He also has written more than 100 papers and many books.