He studied chemistry at the ETH Zürich and worked for his doctorate at University of Basel under the guidance of Werner Kuhn (not related).

Kuhn began to work for his doctorate by investigating decoiling of a random coiled chain molecule in a flowing viscous solvent.

Kuhn was fascinated by the model's simplicity and by its great success in theoretically analyzing a broad variety of experiments in quantitative terms.

[6] Kuhn made experiments with macroscopic models of random coils to describe the behavior in flowing liquids more accurately than based on the dumbbell-model.

[7] In Pauling's lab, Kuhn was trying to understand the color of polyenes by describing π-electrons as particles in a box and he was greatly disappointed - it did not work.

[10] This effect is often called Peierls instability: starting from a linear chain of equally spaced atoms Peierls considered first order perturbation theory with Bloch functions showing the instability, but he did not consider the self-consistency resulting in the transition to alternation of single and double bonds.

[17] This room-filling analogue computer was applied by Kuhn's research group to calculate bond lengths in π-electron systems.

[10][15][18][19][20][21][22] In the beginning of the 1960s, Kuhn thought about a new paradigm in chemistry: the synthesis of different molecules which fit structurally into each other in such a way that they form planned functional units (supramolecular machines).

In close correspondence to the objective of constructing supramolecular functional units he (now at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen) approached theoretically the origin of life: modelling a hypothetical chain of many small physical-chemical steps that leads to the genetic apparatus.

The skill of the experimentalist building supramolecular machines is replaced in life's origin by very particular conditions given by chance in a very particular location on the prebiotic earth and elsewhere in the universe driving the process.