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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Following Schrödinger, we know the cat is either dead or alive, but we just don’t understand, at a deep level, what the difference really is. Making chemicals whether hydrocarbons or amino acids, does little to illuminate this question.
Max Hugoson: What about banded iron 2 billion years ago? When oxygen first appeared (and reappeared) in the air, iron first began to oxidize, and in fact O2 could not establish itself until all surface iron had been oxidized. This had not been the case before.
In my view the vast gulf that separates a few organic compounds created in this kind of experiment from the incredible chemical and structural complexity of a single living cell is not even close to being bridged by our current scientific understanding. Oh sure, we have lots of brilliant speculation as to how it might have happend over billions of years of random events, but it remains only speculation. The fact that life is indeed here in no way settles the question as to how it came to be.
I submit that the question as to how the first single living cell came into being remains a profound mystery.
The second link I posted is the 3 hour presentation but begins with the discussion of populist ‘evolution’ books—-FYI.
First, it may be difficult to find a suitable example because it is the precise process searchers are after to fill the gap between the ‘primordial soup’ and the ‘complex system’ we could define as ‘life’. So demanding for such example is fallacious.
Second, concluding from such missing step (and many others), as some people have done previously (here and elsewhere), that because we don’t know, it must be God, is the equivalent of saying that because we don’t know why climate changes, it must be CO2. Such method is unscientific.
Third, Biology obeys the laws of Physics (ie all what we know in Biology is explainable and consistent with Physics). No divine intervention is required to describe and explain the world in which life has emerged, ie Physics is a self-sufficient framework. Therefore no supernatural entity nor any other teleological speculation has to be logically assumed to explain the currently unknown in Biology, only laws of Physics.
So, as usually in Science, the proper experiment will (one day) fill the gap between what we know and what we don’t (yet) know.
But let the folklore lives in the meantime.
Dave says:
March 23, 2011 at 6:06 am
Instead of rehashing old debates about the roles of god/chance/whatnot in the origin of life, does anyone want to take a stab at suggesting a reason why it should matter one way or the other? Would you change anything about your behaviour or lifestyle if you knew for sure which it was?
Well of course it matters whether we were created by God or by chance. And of course it changes your behaviour. If I am created by God then I have to do something with that God. Does He care about us? Does He have rules as to what is right and what is wrong? Is there a consequence for not obeying Him? If there is an eternal God does that mean I will live somewhere, based on my life, forever?
And if this all happened by chance then there is no creator no God and I assume the role of God. I decide what is right or wrong based on how I was raised or my cultural beliefs or what feels right to me. No one can impose his or her will on me because I am my god and you are your god. No absolutes, no truth, no rules, except mine for me and yours for you.
As for me I know that there is a God who created everything and gave it order and structure. When I see discussions like this I think of Occam’s razor. Scientists have spent years and years coming up with the most complex convoluted theories to explain the extraordinary complexity of life that we see around us. Saying that this great complexity of something evolved from nothing instead of looking to the obvious that we were created by God. And they do it because if they admit that God created us then they have to do something with that God, either believe in Him or deny Him.
So yes it does matter whether you believe we are created by ‘chance’ or by God, and I would suggest it is the most important belief you’ll ever have in your life.
mary
“Doug Allen says:
March 23, 2011 at 6:43 am
One of the puzzling things in life is life! What is extremely improbable over a few million years may be probable (a thousand times more likely) over a few billion years. This misunderstanding (or underappreciation of the immense scope of time) is one of the major blinders of the “can’t happen” crowd.”
Well said….it’s way beyond our perception.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:15 pm
“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. ”
The term Universe by definition means one. There can be no more. Perhaps what you are referring to are other dimensions within the universe? Otherwise know as things far beyond our perception.
IMHO the proper combination of materials exist on earth, and time permitted the events to unfold. Of that we can be sure.
If that disagrees with one’s religious belief, then why not be comforted by the knowledge that the properties of the inorganic materials, and their motions, were not likely self ordained.
tmtisfree: “First, it may be difficult to find a suitable example because it is the precise process searchers are after to fill the gap between the ‘primordial soup’ and the ‘complex system’ we could define as ‘life’. So demanding for such example is fallacious.”
Excellent, so you concede that no-one knows of such an example yet. Precisely my point.
“Second, concluding from such missing step (and many others), as some people have done previously (here and elsewhere), that because we don’t know, it must be God, is the equivalent of saying that because we don’t know why climate changes, it must be CO2. Such method is unscientific.”
I generally agree with you on this point. I certainly didn’t make that assumption (though perhaps others have).
“Third, Biology obeys the laws of Physics (ie all what we know in Biology is explainable and consistent with Physics). No divine intervention is required to describe and explain the world in which life has emerged, ie Physics is a self-sufficient framework. Therefore no supernatural entity nor any other teleological speculation has to be logically assumed to explain the currently unknown in Biology, only laws of Physics.”
Yes, of course biology obeys the laws of physics. Your conclusion that physics is a sufficient cause for the formation of life does not follow, however, and is wholly unwarranted. To wit, the fact that in your first paragraph you acknowledged that no-one knows how it happened yet. Thus, your statement is little more than a declaration of faith in physics. And by physics, I presume you mean chance chemical and physical occurrences that happen to not violate the laws of physics? Or do you posit some physical law that inevitably causes life to arise? Further, you haven’t even dealt with the critial aspect, that of information. The fact that biology follows the laws of physics is no more relevant to the origin of life than the fact that pen and paper both follow the laws of physics is relevant to the origin of War and Peace. Life is *not* simply a collection of particles that follow the laws of physics and chemistry. What do we make of the fact that there is information in life?
I’m hardly learned about the Miller synthesis experiment; but it has been my impression that whatever the mixture of gases they started out with, they ended up with molecules basic to biology. If that is true, then the exact composition of the early atmosphere is of minor relevance.
While the Miller experiment proves very little, it is a powerful plausibility argument. If you can create this many complex organics in a volume of a few liters, over a week or so — think what could happen if we run the same experiment over the entire Earth, for a billion years!
A billion years is not only longer than you imagine, it’s longer than you can imagine.
It does not matter you believe in God (or not): your (absence of) belief is independent of the research about the complexity of life. The complexity of the whole Universe relies upon the interactions of a few dozens of particles (and possibly at a deeper scale of few elemental strings) which combinations lead from deeper scales to higher scales to entities with greater complexity but relatively decipherable laws governing their existence and interactions: no deity is required for explaining this chain of processes. Arguably life is a matter of 3 or 4 scales on the whole body of scales, where 1 or 2 are yet unknown. There is no reason why we should not find in the future the mechanisms behind the complexity of life or any similarly and apparently intractable problems. If History is of any help, it shows that at any given time the unknown has only defined the limit of our own understanding, not the requirement of any supernaturality.
tmtisfree says: “No divine intervention is required to describe and explain the world in which life has emerged, ie Physics is a self-sufficient framework. ”
Yeah, but who came up with that exact value for Pi that we can’t quite nail down yet?
…And who invented Physics?
I haven’t read all the comments so I’m adding blind here forgive me if someone has already mentioned this.
There is some questions about out gassing from the earth and when the last Extinction Level Event (ELE) occured that would have destroyed all of the . It seems the geo physical evidence puts the outgasing ending about 4.2 Billon years ago, and the last surface ELE at 4.2 Billion years ago.. .. if they bring that ELE forward to 4.1 the experiement would be interesting but fruitless.
Another option is seeding of pre-biotics from space – that is meteors raining in simple sugars and such that are imbeded in them. This happens today btw.
Lastly another option is that in a sufficently mixing ocean, with lots of disovled CO2 and other chemicals the water will organize like 5 and 6 carbon sugars for a breif instant – measured in milli seconds – but perhaps long enough to help provide a frame work for ribose or glucose to be formed.
All of these are interesting, but lacking a TARDIS, I suppose we won’t ever know for sure… 😉
(all this from a 1 credit hour college course 20 years ago ! – but then it was perhaps about 1 of about 30 credit ours of my degree that was really interesting – total degree was like 120-130 so 1/4 was of any lasting interest)
There is no (causal or others) relation between my third and first statements : that the precise mechanism(s) of how life formed is yet unknown, this stands by itself as our current level of knowledge (or lack thereof). That does not impede any consequence about the enforcement of physical Laws on Biology. In addition, you cannot have it both ways: either Biology obeys the Laws of Physics (ie Laws of Physics is sufficient to explain Biology), either Physics is not sufficient (ie Biology is explained by some other undefined and non-physical something. That is, Biology does not obey the Laws of Physics). There is an inescapable logical inconsistency in this line of reasoning.
By Physics, I means all the fundamental Laws governing all the processes at all the scales of what is currently measurable. Not more, not less.
Information is indeed important in the characterization of the degree of complexity of system, together with energy and matter. But this concept offers no explanation (because of its fuzziness or ill-definition), at every levels [(sub-)molecular, macromolecular, cellular and even above] considered, on the physical mechanisms or processes (which obeys Laws of Physics) involved in life emergence, and thus is irrelevant.
Ellen: “While the Miller experiment proves very little, it is a powerful plausibility argument. If you can create this many complex organics in a volume of a few liters, over a week or so — think what could happen if we run the same experiment over the entire Earth, for a billion years!”
Yeah, you get more of those organics. Has very little to do with formation of life.
“A billion years is not only longer than you imagine, it’s longer than you can imagine.”
A billion years is but a rounding error for the kinds of time that would be required to form proteins and similar kinds of complex molecules by chance. Amino acids are but the building blocks and assuming that they can self-organize into anything closely resembling life is a bit like finding some silicate sand on the beach and assuming it can turn into a supercomputer.
————
tmtisfree, can we set aside the discussion about God and the supernatural and just look at what we have from an objective standpoint. I don’t know what you mean by “supernatural.”
Ellen said:
“think what could happen if we run the same experiment over the entire Earth, for a billion years!
A billion years is not only longer than you imagine, it’s longer than you can imagine.”
You make a good point and it would be quite easy for one to overlook the notion of the incomprehensible passage of time in a billion years. However, methinks that some here are oversimplifying or completely assuming away the equally incomprehensible leap from a brew of organic compounds to the incredible complexity of a single living cell. No one comes anywhere close to understanding how such a leap could have occurred – much less actually reproducing it.
Assume a primordial mix of elements, add a volcano here, a strike of lightning there, maybe a few meteors, agitate with unknown perturbations for a billion years, and badda bing! – out comes a living, reproducing cell.
Get what I mean?
I have had discussion in the past with some folks who think Maths are no Science. But to be fair I am not sure what is your point.
My response to you (March 23, 2011 at 1:11 pm) is God-free.
My post at March 23, 2011 at 11:36 am is to maryr March 23, 2011 at 9:50 am.
Even if life is a great statistically determined accident of time, laws of physics and biology, just knowing that if the fine structure constant were a little different, or if the universe had expanded a little slower, or a little faster, or if the energy levels within the atomic structure were a little different, etc, etc, that none of what is would exist, is enough to prove, for me, that there is an Intelligent Designer. And He must have a a great deal of patience and a tremendous sense of humor to put up with us.
One of those deep threads it seems.
Take, for example, the Big Bang.
Why must the universe have had a beginning, when it seems to really have no end (temporal or spatial)?
Could it be that we project our own mortal limitations upon the universe? Out of envy perhaps?
Why would an omnipotent being wait until a certain point in time to make a big bang?
Makes me wonder if there is another explanation for Red Shift.
This is the point of contention. It appears that a lab experiment using a mix of simple gases and ingredients and by applying also simple physical phenomenons is able to produced relatively complex molecules which are the bricks of a key molecular system required to sustains life.
In itself, it is not a demonstration of anything (panspermia can also explain those molecules). But this link suggests a line of research like a light in a tunnel: the combination of the simple leads to the complex, a paradigm so usual in other scientific fields.
Nevertheless, at scales above this simple experiment (for example the apparition of auto-catalytic systems) how such mechanisms emerge is still unclear, even in a simple living entity. So they are studied in chemistry or material science (ie self-assembly).
I agree thought the puzzle looks awfully mingled at the moment, but History shows that Science is a succession of such despairs only to push the limit further.
I find it interesting that the “scientific” community that believes in abiogenesis has a hard time finding representatives for formal debate. Several have posted here that seem as if they, or someone they know, would qualify and be able to receive sponsorship for a debate on the subject. I can easily arrange the place, a qualified debater, an academic institution’s facilities, and sponsorship for one arguing against abiogenesis, Any takers on the other end?
Just because someone is a Christian (say) doesn’t mean they don’t find the story of how life began interesting, worth studying and pursuing. Vigilance is also needed so no one hijacks the subject to declare a winner when infact no such conclusion can be drawn(hello Mr. Dawkins). It is one of the most fascinating subjects there is frankly, for me, and would like to see the WUWT brain power brought to bear on the subject but as it gets close to religion…..the heat gets turned up and the discussion dissolves.
What is the truth of the matter. What is the limit of knowledge. What are the gaps and what can fill it. As NO ONE has done any evolutionary biology on the cell, and no one has cracked the origin of life…..we have a long way to go on this one. As Dr. Lynch said, if all the human cells in us died and all the bacterial ones kept going, you’d still be able to see us walking around. We are the accumulation of many divisions of cells and we tend to accumulate intron errors spliced into our DNA. We are al Mutants with each generation of human having a 100 or so additional intron inserts. Most of them are delitirious. The development can only be explained…in the absence of natural selection (though it does play a minor role). Before RNA is completed and certified to be used to make a protein, the introns have to be snipped out. One virus has 2 introns and a 128 protein splicing machine to manage those two introns. I digress…. so, the origin of life story, which doesn’t exist yet, is important because life is incredibly…. implausible! Yes? No?
…Ambiogenesis??
Wasn’t there a headline recently about a find of a living _________ which was living and thriving in a pond of brackish ___________ (i’d like to say Sauerkraut but that would be just wrong!)