Eigen, Manfred (1927– )

German chemist who worked on extremely rapid chemical reactions (those taking less than 1 millisecond). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1967 for his development from 1954 of the technique by which very short bursts of energy could be applied to solutions, disrupting their equilibrium and enabling him to investigate momentary reactions, such as the formation and dissociation of water.

Eigen was born in Bochum, Ruhr, and educated at Göttingen. From 1953 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen, eventually becoming its director.

Eigen investigated particularly very fast biochemical reactions that take place in the body. With his colleague Ruthild Winkler he tried to relate chance and chemistry in processes that could have led to the origin of life on Earth. Eigen theorized that in the ‘primeval soup’ of the early Earth, cycles of chemical reactions would have occurred, one reproducing nucleic acids and one reproducing proteins, and that life arose from a combination of these.