Siegfried Huneck was born on 9 September 1928 in Floh (Floh-Seligenthal) [de], a small settlement in the Thuringian Forest region (Thuringia, Germany).

After the war ended, Huneck's region became part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where the actions of citizens were heavily controlled by the state.

Starting in 1950, Huneck began employment as a laboratory worker in the RFT broadcasting station in Erfurt (doing metal analysis), and then a year later as a scientific-chemical assistant in the Volkseigener Betrieb ("people-owned factory") in Jenapharm.

[2] Immediately afterwards he started working at the Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena as a scientific assistant, while simultaneously continuing his university studies on triterpenes.

[2] In 1959, Siegfried Huneck received a PhD (magna cum laude) from the University of Jena defending a thesis on the chemistry of amino-derivatives of pentacyclic triterpenes (Über Aminosäuren von pentazyklischen Triterpenen).

Here he was able to direct his efforts to the area that interested him the most: the study of natural compounds in lichens, liverworts, and higher plants.

[2][3] During his time here, he published about 250 papers, many of them as part of a series with the title "Mitteilungen uber Flechteninhaltsstoffe" ("Communications on lichen constituents").

His extensive network of friends and colleagues in the western world compensated for the lack of modern research equipment available for use in his laboratory.

Although he was not allowed to travel outside of socialist countries, Huneck was able to participate in research expeditions to Tajikistan, Mongolia, and North Korea, where he collected plants and lichens for chemical analysis.

[2] After the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Huneck was free to visit his friends and colleagues, and he attended several scientific conferences and international meetings, as well as botanical excursions.

[14] A complete listing of Huneck's 412 authored and co-authored scientific publications is given in Stordeur and colleagues' 2011 obituary.