May 29, 2007  "Origin of Life Chemist" Stanley Miller

Stanley Miller died last week. Back in 1952 he performed what has become an iconic experiment in the history of science. One of the big questions concerning the history of life on earth was where did the complex organic compounds come from that all life needs to exist?  Researchers at the time had a pretty good idea that the early earth had ample amounts of hydrogen, water, which is just oxygen and hydrogen, methane, which consists of just carbon and hydrogen, and ammonia, made up of just nitrogen and hydrogen. 

Miller put water and ammonia into a flask with methane and hydrogen gas.  He then zapped it with electricity, to approximate the energetic input of lightning strikes and coronal discharges.  When he analyzed the results, the flask of course contained the same elements, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.  But some very interesting chemistry had taken place.  The breaking of existing chemical bonds and the formation of new ones had turned the starting components into amino acids—the building blocks of protein.  And the now familiar notion of a primordial soup, from which complex biomolecules had sprung, was born.