After decades of languishing in a cardboard box, unanalyzed vials from a famous chemistry experiment have been brought back to the lab, revealing new clues to the beginnings of life on Earth.
Over 50 years ago, Stanley Miller, then a 23-year-old graduate student, conducted an experiment that is now a staple of biology. Miller and his adviser, Nobel laureate Harold Urey, showed that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could be made from a cocktail of basic precursors, the so-called primordial soup.
A research team led by Miller’s former graduate student Jeffrey Bada analyzed leftovers from a variation on this experiment. The researchers report in the Oct. 17 Science that remnants from an experiment conducted with a simulated volcanic environment contain an even larger number of biologically important amino acids.