Origins of Life: Experiment #1.x (2010-)

Around 1950, the physicist Harold Urey proposed that it might be possible to test such scientific stories by recreating the atmosphere of the Earth and adding an energy source such as lightning to the mix. A graduate student by the name of Stanley Miller heard one of Urey’s talks on this subject and proposed to Urey that they carry out such a test. Urey was reluctant, but Miller convinced him that it would make a good Ph. D. thesis. Using the best knowledge about the Earth’s primordial atmosphere available at the time, Miller set up an experiment in which methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water were mixed in the presence of an intermittent electrical discharge. Within days, the experiment yielded the amino acid glycine, and within a week, alanine and urea as well. No previous experiment had yielded even one amino acid, let alone several, so Miller’s experiment represented a major breakthrough. He published his results in 1953 in the journal Science and it quickly became a scientific and public icon of origins of life experimentation.

Origins of life: Experiment #1 is a continuation of Miller’s 1953 experiment. This experiment has only been replicated exactly once before (by Hough and Rogers, in 1956), and it yielded the same compounds as Miller’s original. No one has ever run the experiment through multiple cycles of synthesis to see if, after several weeks or months, small peptides, sugars or other important compounds result. Moreover, the number of variations run on Miller’s experiment is very limited, despite the fact that the primordial atmosphere was almost certainly not the one that he replicated in his experiment. And now a great deal is known about the atmospheres of other planets and their moons. Thus, there are a huge number of permutations of Miller’s experiment that can fruitfully be run by making this into an “open source” experiment in which many people can contribute and participate.