I find this very interesting, partly because I recreated Stanley Miller’s famous experiment for my high school science fair. It brings back fond memories of basement science projects. – Anthony
Primordial soup gets spicier
‘Lost’ samples from famous origin of life researcher could send the search for Earth’s first life in a new direction
Stanley Miller gained fame with his 1953 experiment showing the synthesis of organic compounds thought to be important in setting the origin of life in motion. Five years later, he produced samples from a similar experiment, shelved them and, as far as friends and colleagues know, never returned to them in his lifetime.
More 50 years later, Jeffrey Bada, Miller’s former student and a current Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego professor of marine chemistry, discovered the samples in Miller’s laboratory material and made a discovery that represents a potential breakthrough in the search for the processes that created Earth’s first life forms.
Former Scripps undergraduate student Eric Parker, Bada and colleagues report on their reanalysis of the samples in the March 21 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Miller’s 1958 experiment in which the gas hydrogen sulfide was added to a mix of gases believed to be present in the atmosphere of early Earth resulted in the synthesis of sulfur amino acids as well as other amino acids. The analysis by Bada’s lab using techniques not available to Miller suggests that a diversity of organic compounds existed on early planet Earth to an extent scientists had not previously realized.
“Much to our surprise the yield of amino acids is a lot richer than any experiment (Miller) had ever conducted,” said Bada.
The new findings support the case that volcanoes — a major source of atmospheric hydrogen sulfide today — accompanied by lightning converted simple gases into a wide array of amino acids, which are were in turn available for assembly into early proteins.
Bada also found that the amino acids produced in Miller’s experiment with hydrogen sulfide are similar to those found in meteorites. This supports a widely-held hypothesis that processes such as the ones in the laboratory experiments provide a model of how organic material needed for the origin of life are likely widespread in the universe and thus may provide the extraterrestrial seeds of life elsewhere.
Successful creation of the sulfur-rich amino acids would take place in the labs of several researchers, including Miller himself, but not until the 1970s.
“Unbeknownst to him, he’d already done it in 1958,” said Bada.
Miller’s initial experiments in the 1950s with colleague Harold Urey used a mixture of gases such as methane, ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen and electrically charged them as lightning would. The experiment, which took place in a closed chamber meant to simulate conditions on early Earth, generated several simple amino acids and other organic compounds in what became known as “primordial soup.”
With the gases and electrical energy they produce, many geoscientists believe the volcanoes on a young planet covered much more extensively by water than today’s served as oases of raw materials that allowed prebiotic matter to accumulate in sufficient quantities to assemble into more complex material and eventually into primitive life itself. Bada had already begun reanalyzing Miller’s preserved samples and drawing conclusions about the role of volcanoes in sparking early life when he came across the previously unknown samples. In a 2008 analysis of samples left from Miller’s more famous experiment, Bada’s team had been able to detect many more amino acids than his former mentor had thanks to modern techniques unavailable to Miller.
Miller, who became a chemistry professor at UCSD in 1960, conducted the experiments while a faculty member at Columbia University. He had collected and catalogued samples from the hydrogen sulfide mix but never analyzed them. He only casually mentioned their existence late in his life and the importance of the samples was only realized shortly before his death in 2007, Bada said. It turned out, however, that his 1958 mix more closely resembled what geoscientists now consider early Earth conditions than did the gases in his more famous previous experiment.
“This really not only enhances our 2008 study but goes further to show the diversity of compounds that can be produced with a certain gas mixture,” Bada said.
The Bada lab is gearing up to repeat Miller’s classic experiments later this year. With modern equipment including a miniaturized microwave spark apparatus, experiments that took the elder researcher weeks to carry out could be completed in a day, Bada said.
Parker, now a student at Georgia Tech, led the study. Co-authors include H. James Cleaves from the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington D.C.; Jason P. Dworkin, Daniel P. Glavin and Michael P. Callahan of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; Andrew D. Aubrey of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif. and Antonio Lazcano of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography: scripps.ucsd.edu
Scripps News: scrippsnews.ucsd.edu
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Condensed primordial soup, ready in 4.5 billino years.
Pretty much the same as the field rations we had in the army. The essential proof of why the latrines should be deep and way off camp.
What a fantastic, thought-provoking post. The quest for knowledge continues.
Of course the importance of CO2 in those early days can’t be overlooked and (perhaps arguably?) the importance of CO2 in the atmosphere for life moving onto land . . .
Just say’n . . .
-barn
Interesting to see Harold Urey’s name there. Urey won a “real” Nobel Prize for physical chemistry, the discovery of deuterium. He was a pioneeer of 18O chemistry, and therefore one of the fathers of quantitative palaeoclimatology.
Got the primordial soup but wheres the life?.
RE: Mark.r says:
March 22, 2011 at 9:04 pm
Got the primordial soup but wheres the life?.
Indeed, also where is the mechanism for assembling protiens? How is it that there are “laws” governing the process?
“Science” often overextends itself into Metaphysics.
My father was a young-Earth creationist until he died, and a chemist. He found it quite unremarkable that you got “higher order chemicals” with an input of energy. But our universe seethes with energy. It is what it is made out of.
Miller’s experiments were conducted under hypothesized primitive atmospheres. Since we live on land in the air, we have sought the origin of life in an interface of water, land and air. Today, we know that life began in deep sea vents, where there are sharp gradients that protolife could exploit for energy. To this day, our mitochondria get their energy from windmills driven by a sharp pH gradient on opposite sides of a mitochondrial membrane.
I researched origins for Biochem II a few years ago and found an embarassment of riches–many explanations for origin of basic monomers and mechanisms of polymerization. My favorite scientific articles on the origin of life are:
Westheimer, F. H. “Why nature chose phosphates” Science 235, 1173-1178
Martell, Edward A., Radionuclide-induced Evolution of DNA and the Origin of Life”, J. Mol. Evol. 35: 346-355. 1992 [a key one that is almost unknown]
Martin, william and Michael J. Rusell (2003) “On the Origin of Cells: a hyposthsis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells” Philosophical Trans. of the Royal Soc. of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 358: (1429): 59-85
Mark.r says:
March 22, 2011 at 9:04 pm
Got the primordial soup but wheres the life?.
Ah, you had to ask, “where’s the farmer who planted the seeds”.
With millions of Earths out there, Johnny Galactic Appleseed must have had a field day.
Got a mirror?
Most importantly… add a can of water!
Although interesting, this primordial soup experiment is too simple. Surely the atmosphere was much more complex and the solar system, especially the sun, surely also influenced what was happening on earth. Then you have snowball earth… what happened to life then? Did it contribute? Some say the fact of freezing the water out and concentrating the “soup” might have helped. But then you face the problem of UV radiation which would destroy any protein not properly protected.
The origin of life is not that simple to explain through a simple chemistry experiment… too simple to explain the complexity of life.
I believe there is a fundamental problem with the 1953 experiment.
Aside from the “information theory” problem of ACTUALLY RUNNING AN ANALYTICAL PROCESS to “determine” the existance of the Amino acids (does anyone understand what I mean by this??? I.e., INFORMATION was added to the system by doing the analysis….hello!) there is also the problem of COMPOSITION.
The atmosphere has never, to the understanding of most paleo-researchers, been BASIC in it’s composition. I.e., it never had high NH3 composition, and has always been an OXIDIZING atmosphere, not a reducing.
Thus the basic elements in the composition are not correct in the experiment.
I’m sort of cognizant of this experiment, as it was performed about the time of my birthday. So my critics, who point out that I’m old enough to KNOW FIRST HAND the primative atmosphere, can …as our Brit friends say, “Bug Off”! (And, yes, I’ve been trying to reduce myself most of the years past my 14th year on this Earth.)
“that allowed prebiotic matter to accumulate in sufficient quantities to assemble into more complex material and eventually into primitive life itself.”
God did something to make it come together on earth, and who knows where else in the Universe, or I should say, the Multiverse, or “The Bulk”, since it’s becoming clearer there’s more than one Universe, nobody can know how many just yet. Creation becomes more beautiful and interesting the more we learn. The earth and everything on it (they say there’s more life under the surface of the earth in the crust and mantle than there is above it in the oceans and on the dry land) was made by materials that are all over the Universe. The puzzle pieces were brought together by God to make the Blue Marble:
“…….God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth”
It has been mathematically proven by Stephen Wolfram that some simple systems can generate complexity as complex as any complex system in Nature or as complex as any system humans have built. See chapter two of A New Kind of Science for the proof. It is stunningly simple and an inherent or emergent property of the universe that we exist in.
The fact that we’re complex is no surprise, the fact that we arose from simpler chemical process is no surprise especially in light of the primordial soup experiments combined with other self assembling molecular systems and Wolfram’s discoveries about how these simple systems can and do in fact generate maximal complexity – such as us.
No need for any magical super powers, no need for any unexplainable non-evident magical super beings; all that is needed is just blind and basic chemical processes mixed with a dash of physics and a zap of electricity and a tad of information and the touch of internally generated randomness coming together into a complex system, cellular life.
http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/toc.html
It’s alive!
Meh. When they figure out the way that only the alpha amino acids, and only the L- isomers (as opposed to the R-) in that racemic mixture, end up in the peptides that might form in a watery soup that acts to hydrolyze those same peptide bonds, then they’ll have something.
And don’t forget at some point you need to have a proper nucleotide sequence at the same time to keep the whole thing propagating.
Cool! I remember writing a paper about Stanley Miller and his experiments for a college Chemistry class back in 1963-4.
I have my own theory about how life came about, but the margin of this reply is too small to contain it.
Experiments are supposed to be replicatable, thus, the scientist is supposed to tell us exactly how they got the results they got. Thus, I fail to see why there is any need at all to look at the old stored results of this experiment to see what they were. If the original guy, Stanly Miller, had done it right, we should be able to replicate his experiment exactly and get the exact same results. Thus, there is no need to look back at the stored chemicals he came up with from way back then, nor should there be any suprise at what we find if we do, since we should still be getting the exact same results if we do it again. If we are suprised, and we are not getting those results, the experiment is a failure, and the scientific method was not followed. So why does this article even exist, as if this is some big discovery? Are we unable to replicate this experiment now?
Then there are the real questions about life, such as:
Sure, we can get some amino acids, but how do we get only left handed amino acids, with not one right handed?
How do we get them essembled into more complex chemicals and forms needed for life after we do, and how to we get them properly attactched to each other? Sure, we can get an occasional square rock, but how did these rocks get assembled into this cathedral? For that matter, how did they even all get together in one place?
We have tried to get them into more complex forms, but in many cases we have to do things with machines and carefull filtering and chemicals that cannot exist naturally, how do we get all that done in a natural setting, especially making a variety of different chemicals many of which need different conditions for evcn a very rare occurence, and all in one place?
Sure, we get some amino acids, but the essemeblage after that is so diffucult that scientists are now looking at such things as RNA instead of protiens since they have been unable to solve the problems starting with amino acids to protiens to life, so why does this article seem so revolutionary when currently scientists believe it leads to a dead end (literally)?
Scientists still talk about life evolving, yet they cannot even tell us what this life was like. They say “it evolved”, yet they cannot even tell us what IT IS that evolved, much less how.
All we really know about life, after decades of experimenting, is:
1) It appears that the chance for life to appear on this (or any other) planet is so statistically impossible that it cannot happen in the lifetime of this universe, or any other, and…
2) It happened anyway.
I wasn’t thrilled by this article when I first saw it (some time ago) and am no more thrilled now. We didn’t know how life began then and we still don’t now. Discovering that way back then they made a few more chemicals than scientists today believe they did (but should have) that lead to an evolutionary dead end isn’t exactly news.
Anthony Anthony Anthony,
You forgot about this piece.
Thanks, Anthony. I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying the Miller-Urey experiment, althought I can’t say that I reproduced it in high school as you did! Incidentally, tonight was my 5th grader’s science fair at the elementary school. He focused on something much more mundane (mold) than you did for your science fair. 🙂
Renewed interest in the Miller-Urey experiment is great, both to learn what can actually be accomplished through natural processes, and to remind us of the limitations. Will be interesting to see if the $100M Harvard origins initiative finds much additional substance to work with in the recent findings.
Ultimately, we can find all the amino acids we want, and we still won’t be anywhere close to having life. I continue to be amazed that so many people reflexively think the yawning gulf between amino acids and life is but a tiny step, probably because they haven’t really taken time to think through what is needed to get life off the ground. So the news article is much too optimistic in characterizing the find as a potential breakthrough. Nevertheless, it is fun to see renewed interest in the Miller-Urey experiment and it is always great to learn new things, so I will certainly watch this development with interest.
Incidentally, this reminds me of one of my favorite quips:
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.”
pwl, there is a fundamental difference between the “complexity” that Wolfram is talking about and the “complexity” that exists in life. Totally different situation.
“The fact that we’re complex is no surprise, the fact that we arose from simpler chemical process is no surprise especially in light of the primordial soup experiments combined with other self assembling molecular systems and Wolfram’s discoveries about how these simple systems can and do in fact generate maximal complexity – such as us.”
Self-assembling is not interesting, at least not in the vague sense referred to here. Self-reproducing is. Can you please point me to a single example of a self-reproducing molecular system that is known to have arisen through natural causes? Of course not, because if you could, you would have a Nobel Prize attached to your name and you could tell the Harvard folks to save their $100M recently committed to trying to figure this out. This is the holy grail of origins research.
Your post rests on a confusion of the word “complexity,” mixed with with a failure to think through what is actually needed for life to start.
/rant (sorry)
pwl says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:16 pm
I guess you have no clue of what Thermodynamics is.
charles the moderator says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:45 pm
That was hilarious.
I wonder how they could get organic molecules from only inorganic salts. Also, considering that heating the solution would only put water vapor in the gas phase it was truly an amazing experiment… or maybe it was some major contamination of their glassware.
No Eric, it’s the same “complexity”, watch Wolfram’s video in full and read his tome, ANKS, and you might have your eyes opened to a whole new aspect of Nature. It’s likely you just think it’s a different “complexity” because it you to think that that if we’re just an electro-bio-chemical-information-processing machine made of goop that we’re not special, but it’s the same. We’re just bio-goop-mostly-ugly-bags-of-water that can reproduce and made up of many complex systems built upon simple systems generating complex behaviors. RNA and DNA are in many ways cellular automata that can copy themselves or be copied.
Self assembly is a step required before self-copying aka self-reproduction. It’s a matter of “exploring the space of simple molecules that self assemble” to find the ones that can “self-copy” and thus replicate which is a prerequisite for life. Nature can easily conduct exhaustive combinatorial searches through such even vast combinatorial spaces. All it takes is at least one time having something that self assembled and can replicate to get the entire process going, however it’s very possible that it occurred many times. That takes time and the Earth (and possibly the Sol System) had plenty of time to shake and bake the first life.
“Can you please point me to a single example of a self-reproducing molecular system that is known to have arisen through natural causes?”
Look in the mirror Eric and you’ll see such a system that must have gone through that step and with N (where N is a very large number) of generations of copying resulted in you.
Self assembly is not only very interesting but essential to the process, as is the self assembly of self reproducing systems, even if they are haphazard for many generations at first.
When you dig into Wolfram’s ANKS – as well as other required fields relating to the origins of life – you may find yourself altering your limited perceptions and conceptions.
Legatus says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:36 pm
All we really know about life, after decades of experimenting, is:
1) It appears that the chance for life to appear on this (or any other) planet is so statistically impossible that it cannot happen in the lifetime of this universe, or any other, and…
2) It happened anyway.
No, it is an energy-driven process, self-organizing. It may have happened several times, and possibly underground where very interesting catalysis can occur.
2) demonstrates 1) is wrong.
Max, for help with a primitive atmosphere, open the bathroom window. It works for me, at least until the neighbors complain.