For his reportage Der Fluch der guten Tat[36] on a burn unit in Pittsburgh, published in GEO, he won, in 1991, the Egon-Erwin-Kisch-Preis, the most prestigious award for print journalism in Germany.
At the beginning of 2003 he left Der Spiegel and started working for the Max Planck Society, where he started and headed their Berlin office.[37] He left the Society after only one year and started his career as a biographer and novelist.
In January 2005 Neffe published a biography on Albert Einstein, which ranked No 8 of all all non fiction bestsellers in the same year. The book was tranlated into more than ten languages, amongst them English[38][39][40][41] and named "Book of the Year" by the Washington Post in 2007[42].
Between the years 2007 and 2008 Jürgen Neffe traveled around the earth for 7 months in the wake of Charles Darwins legendary circumnavigation on the Beagle. As a result he published a combination of travel writing, science reportage on the development of the Theory of Evolution and a biography of Charles Darwin. In 2011 he used the results of his research for the book as the basis of the newly created interactive and hypermedia E-Book formate Libroid[43], which he developed. Starting point was an essay about the future of the book in the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit[44][45]
With Mehr als wir sind Neffe published his first novel in 2014 [46][47]
1991 Egon-Erwin-Kisch-Preis
Evidence for an early degradative event to the insulin molecule following binding to hepatocyte receptors; S. M. Juul, R. H. Jones, J. L. Evans, J. Neffe, P. H. Sönksen, D. Brandenburg; Biochim. Biophys. Acta 856, 310-319 (1986)
Demonstration that the insulin receptor undergoes an early strucural modification following insulin binding; S. M. Juul, J. Neffe, J. L. Evans, R. H. Jones, P. H. Sönksen, D. Brandenburg; Biochim. Biophys. Acta 856, 320-324 (1986)
Irgendwann habe ich einen ganz starken Willen entwickelt. In: Charlotte Kerner: Nicht nur Madame Curie – Frauen, die den Nobelpreis bekamen. Beltz Verlag, Weinheim/ Basel 1999, ISBN3-407-80862-3.
Einstein – eine Biographie. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2005, ISBN3-499-61937-7.
EINSTEIN - A Biography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, Translated by Shelley Frisch, ISBN978-3-7414-6640-3
EINSTEIN - A Biography. Polity Press, London, Translated by Shelley Frisch, ISBN978-0-7456-4220-8
Darwin. Das Abenteuer des Lebens. C. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 2008, ISBN978-3-570-01091-4.