Manfred Eigen was a German bio- and physical chemist. He developed relaxation kinetics, which helped to shift the temporal resolution limit for chemical processes by many powers of ten to shorter times.
In 1953, Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer brought him to the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry (MPI-pC) in Göttingen, where he became a scientific member in 1958, head of the Department of Chemical Kinetics in 1962, and director of the institute in 1964. In 1967, at the age of 40, Manfred Eigen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of his pioneering work in the field of relaxation kinetics.
From the 1970s onwards, Eigen turned his attention to the study of enzyme reactions and to the study of evolution. Eigen founded the two biotechnology companies Evotec and Direvo, which are active in the fields of high-throughput screening and directed evolution. Since spring 2015, the Manfred Eigen-Förderstiftung has been funding scientific projects at the MPI-pC.