His Excellency Mr. Manfred Eigen

Awarded an honorary doctorate by the UMH on October 7, 1997.

The director of the UMH Institute of Bioengineering, Bernat Soria, delivered the laudatory speech as sponsor of the German physicist and chemist Manfred Eigen during the Solemn Opening Ceremony of the 1997-98 Academic Year and the conferral of honorary doctorates upon Alfonso Escámez López and Manfred Eigen, held at the Gran Teatro in Elche.

Biography

Birth: May 9, 1927, Bochum, Germany

Death: February 6, 2019, Göttingen, Germany
Known for: Rapid chemical reactions
Awards: Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Paul Ehrlich Prize, and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize

A German chemist who in 1967 shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Ronald Norrish and George Porter for their kinetic studies of extremely fast reactions by perturbing the equilibrium with very short energy pulses. Eigen’s procedures, using high-voltage electrical discharges, made it possible to study rapid processes as important as the neutralization of acids with alkalis and the kinetics of keto-enol tautomerism.

Manfred Eigen, the son of a chamber musician, received his secondary education in his hometown. In 1945 he began his studies in physics and chemistry at the University of Göttingen, where he earned his doctorate in natural sciences in 1951 under the supervision of Arnold Eucken. His dissertation concerned the specific heat of heavy water and aqueous electrolytic solutions.

Manfred Eigen remained at that university for two more years as an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Chemistry, working for Ewald Wicke. In 1953, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, which had relocated to Göttingen under the direction of Karl F. Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer’s influence, who had provided Eigen with excellent working conditions, was evident in his later work in the field of biophysical chemistry.

Between 1951 and 1953, he had already begun his studies on fast ionic reactions, encouraged by the ultrasound absorption measurements carried out by his colleagues Konrad Tamm and Walter Kurtze. In 1953, they published a joint paper on the absorption of sound by various salt solutions. In their theoretical section, they demonstrated how absorption could be used to estimate the rate of reactions as rapid as those occurring in solution.

In the following years, he developed measurement techniques that allowed him to record sub-nanosecond timescales. Many of these techniques were improved in collaboration with Leo de Maeyer, who had joined the laboratory in 1964. He was particularly interested in reactions involving protons and, together with De Maeyer, was the first to determine the neutralization rate. They also discovered the characteristic anomalous proton conduction in ice crystals.

The development of the relaxation theory for multi-step processes was followed by studies on metal complex reactions, in which they investigated the rapid reactions of a number of metal ions in relation to their position in the periodic table of elements. Around 1960, their work shifted toward the physical chemistry of organic compounds. They determined the intermediate steps of several reaction mechanisms and experimentally verified a general theory of acid-base catalysis.

Simultaneously, he began to delve into biochemical questions that would eventually become the focus of his research: hydrogen bonds in nucleic acids, the transfer of the genetic code, and the enzymes and lipids of membranes. He was also interested in biological regulation and control processes and the problem of information storage in the central nervous system. Almost every year, he traveled to Boston with his friend and colleague Leo de Maeyer to discuss matters of common interest with neurologists, biochemists, and biophysicists. Eigen was appointed a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute in 1957, its director in 1964, and its administrative director from 1967 to 1970. He was also elected to the Scientific Council of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Source: Fernández, Tomás and Tamaro, Elena. “Biography of Manfred Eigen.” In Biografías y Vidas. The online biographical encyclopedia [Internet]. Barcelona, ​​Spain, 2004. Available at https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/e/eigen.htm.