Manfred Eigen
Manfred Eigen ( born May 9, 1927 in Bochum ) is a German organic or physical chemist and former director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. Own the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1967 ) was awarded in recognition of his work on the speed measurement of fast chemical reactions.
Life
Self comes from a musical family. After graduating from high school in 1944 at the Humanistic Gymnasium in Bochum (now Gymnasium am east ring ) studied self- physics and chemistry at the University of Göttingen, where he produced his doctoral thesis at Arnold Eucken. In 1957 he became director today the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Since 1965 he is honorary professor at the TU Braunschweig.
Work
Manfred Eigen developed kinetic methods for the study of extremely fast reactions. By means of the relaxation method he was able to examine the kinetics of fast biochemical reactions. Specially name is linked with the theory of the hypercycle, the cyclic linking reaction cycles as an explanation for the self-organization of prebiotic systems, which he described together with Peter Schuster in 1979. The self - Wilkins mechanism was named after him.
About the study of enzyme reactions, he later turned to the study of evolution. Self studied the behavior of nucleic acids were amplified by polymerase and degraded by nucleases. By repeating the reduction and build cycles occurred to build up nucleic acids were resistant to degradation by mutation by nucleases. The experiments often lasted only need a few hours.
These experiments led to the development of so-called Evolution machines. This is to bioreactors, in which to breed, for example, viral cultures and their evolution can be observed under laboratory conditions.
By varying the reactor parameters, the frequency of mutations and the speed of evolution can be influenced. The method is currently used on an industrial scale.
Self- founded two biotechnology companies, Evotec and Direvo who work in the field of high-throughput screening and directed evolution ( directed evolution ).
Awards
1962 Self was awarded the Otto Hahn Prize for Chemistry and Physics. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967 split into two teams of researchers. The 40 -year-old self, who worked with the Belgian chemist Leo de Maeyer, was awarded jointly with Ronald Norrish and George Porter George Wreyford for his studies on the kinetics of extremely fast exothermic chemical reactions with relaxation methods. Since 1976 self is a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, since 1972, corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
As President of the Academic Foundation of the German people, he urged the formation of a power elite, which earned him many critics. He is patron of the annual XLAB Science Festival in Göttingen. The Republic of Austria honored him in 1976 with the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
In 1980 he received the Prize of Lower Saxony Science. Him the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize was awarded in 1992. 1994 awarded him the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal. In the same year he received the Max Planck Research Prize together with Rudolf Rigler from the Karolinska Institute. Since 2001 Manfred 's own honorary member of the Ruhr- University Bochum. He has received several honorary doctorates, such as Harvard University. In 2005 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore. 2007 Self was awarded the Golden Goethe Medal and 2011, the Wilhelm Exner Medal.