Stanley Miller
(1930-2007)
Stanley Miller was a student of
Harold Urey at UC San Diego. Urey had studied thermodynamics with
Gilbert N. Lewis at UC Berkeley and spent his post-doctoral years in in Denmark at the
Niels Bohr's Institute and traveled to Germany to meet
Albert Einstein and
Max Planck.
Miller is best known for his 1952 experiments with Urey to see what pre-biotic "organic" chemicals might be produced in simulated early-Earth atmospheres containing only inorganic chemicals. Miller sent an electric discharge through a test tube and showed the synthesis of several important amino acids, the building blocks for proteins.
Alexander Oparin and J.B.S.Haldane had speculated that some locations on the early Earth might hold a "primordial soup" where life might have originated as the chemical evolution of carbon-based large molecules. Oparin suggested that the early Earth had a strongly
reducing atmosphere, containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor, but no oxygen. In his opinion, these were the raw materials for the evolution of life..
Miller used a combination of methane (CH
4), ammonia (NH
3), and Oxygen (O
2), heated with steam (H
2O) and shocked with an electric spark. In 1972 he and his collaborators repeated the 1952 experiment, but with the latest automatic chemical analyzers, such as mass spectrometry and gas and ion-exchange chromatography. They found 33 amino acids, including 10 of the twenty found in living organisms.
Jeffrey Bada has continued Miller-style experiments at UC San Diego and found many more biological compound, including the nucleic acid bases that form DNA and RNA.
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