Manfred Eigen

Eigen was born on 9 May 1927 in Bochum, the son of Ernst and Hedwig (Feld) Eigen, a chamber musician. He managed to escape (he said later that escape was relatively easy), 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. 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. In 1967, Eigen was awarded, along with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, 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. Eigen founded two biotechnology companies, Evotec and Direvo. In 1981, Eigen became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. Eigen was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences even though he was an atheist. He died on 6 February 2019 at the age of 91. ==Personal life==

Eigen was married to Elfriede Müller. ==Honours and awards==

Eigen won numerous awards for his research including: • Otto Hahn Prize (1962) • Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964) • Elected a member of the American Philosophical Society (1968) • • Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1973 • Pour le Mérite (1973) • Faraday Lectureship Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1977 • Lower Saxony State Prize for Science (1980) • Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (1992) • Honorary member of the Ruhr University Bochum (2001) • Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore (2005) Honorary doctorates He received 15 honorary doctorates. • Honorary Professor, Technical University of Braunschweig (1965) • Honorary doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis (1966) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago (1966) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham (1968) • Honorary Professor, University of Göttingen (1971) • Honorary doctorate from Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1973) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Hull (1976) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Bristol (1978) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Debrecen (1982) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge (1982) • Honorary doctorate from Technical University of Munich (1983) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Bielefeld (1985) • Honorary doctorate from Utah State University (1990) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Alicante (1990) • Honorary doctorate from the University of Coimbra, Portugal (2007) • Honorary Degree, Scripps Institute of Research (2011) ==References==