Nobel Prize winning German biophysicist Manfred Eigen is best known for his work on fast chemical reactions and his development of ways to accurately measure these reactions down to the nearest billionth of a second. He has published over 100 papers with topics ranging from hydrogen bridges of nucleic acids to the storage of information in the central nervous system.
Surely, I was born indeed, but for that I have no recollections. But, at least I was told that I was born on May 9th, 1927 in the city of Bochum, which is in the Ruhr area. The birthday then of course played a big role in my life, in childhood you know that's a very important day where you invite all your friends and, yes, so my recollections may go back to age of two or three. Very dim. But then, later on, my parents were - my father was a musician, a chamber musician, and till 1933 he was the chairman of the orchestra in Bochum, but then he was taken from that post by the well-known political events. But he intensified his music by that time and, what I remember in my early days, that we always had concerts at home, we called it house concert, and quite a number of famous musicians came. Also, my father was a friend of Hermann Busch from the famous Busch family, Adolf and Fritz Busch - well known, Hermann Busch was a cellist and they of course had to leave also in the thirties due to the political development. But the house of my parents was full of music. My mother was not a musician but she liked it, and she took care of the social events around the concerts. Of course, as a small child I was not allowed in the evening to come in, but my children's room was very close to the music room - we had a music room - so then I put my ear to the wall. I had a brother who was three years older, and so we both liked to listen to the music.
Title: Early childhood recollections about music
Listeners:
Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitch
Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch is the eldest daughter of the Austrian physicist Klaus Osatitsch, an internationally renown expert in gas dynamics, and his wife Hedwig Oswatitsch-Klabinus. She was born in the German university town of Gottingen where her father worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Aerodynamics under Ludwig Prandtl. After World War II she was educated in Stockholm, Sweden, where her father was then a research scientist and lecturer at the Royal Institute of Technology.
In 1961 Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch enroled in Chemistry at the Technical University of Vienna where she recieved her PhD. in 1969 with a dissertation on "Fast complex reactions of alkali ions with biological membrane carriers". The experimental work for her thesis was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemisty in Gottingen under Manfred Eigen.
From 1971 to the present Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitsch has been working as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Gottingen in the department of Chemical Kinetics which is headed by Manfred Eigen. Her interest was first focused on an application of relaxation techniques to the study of fast biological reactions. Thereafter, she engaged in theoretical studies on molecular evolution and developed game models for representing the underlying chemical proceses. Together with Manfred Eigen she wrote the widely noted book "Laws of the Game" (Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 1981 and Princeton University Press, 1993) her more recent studies were concerned with comparative sequence analysis of nucleic acids, in order to find out the age of the genetic code and the time course of early evolution of life. For the last decade she has been succesfully establishing industrial applications in the field of evolutionary biotechnology.
Duration:
2 minutes, 49 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
July 1997
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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