Manfred Eigen

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Manfred Eigen (born May 9, 1927, Bochum) is a German biophysicist and a former director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

In 1967, he received, together 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, his 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 1979.

See also: Quasispecies model

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Bibliography

Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster The Hypercycle: A principle of natural self-organization, 1979, Springer ISBN 0387092935
Manfred Eigen, Ruthild Winkler: The Rules of the Game, 1993, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691025665
Manfred Eigen, "Molekulare Selbstorganisation und Evolution." (Self organization of matter and the evolution of biological macro molecules.) Naturwissenschaften 58 (10). 1971 pp. 465-523. In English. Influential theoretical paper on origin-of-life biochemistry.