Important personalitiesBack

In 1967, Eigen was awarded, along with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were distinguished 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 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 is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He founded two biotechnology companies, Evotec and Direvo.


Honours and awards

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia.
- Otto Hahn Prize for chemistry and physics (1962)
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1967), shared with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, for his studies on the kinetics of extremely fast running chemical reactions with relaxation methods
- Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Sciences) (1976)
- Corresponding Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (1972)
- Faraday Lectureship Prize (Royal Society of Chemistry, 1977)
- Patron of the annual XLAB Science Festival in Göttingen
- Austrian Decoration for Science and Art
- Lower Saxony State Prize for Science (1980)
- Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (1992)
- Helmholtz Medal (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994)
- Max Planck Research Award (1994), jointly with Rudolf Rigler of the Karolinska Institute
- Honorary member of the Ruhr University Bochum (2001)
- Honorary doctorate from Harvard University
- Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore (2005)
- Wilhelm Exner Medal (2011)




(photo source molbiol.ru)