Stanley Miller and the Quest to Understand Life’s Beginning
One of the 20th century’s most diligent and respected origin-of-life researchers is Stanley Miller. He was a 23-year-old graduate student in 1953 when he sought to recreate the origin of life in a laboratory. He filled a sealed glass apparatus with a few liters of methane, ammonia and hydrogen (representing the atmosphere) and some water (the oceans). A spark-discharge device zapped the gases with simulated lightning, while a heating coil kept the waters bubbling. Within a few days, the water and gases were stained with a reddish goo. On analyzing the substance, Miller found to his delight that it was rich in amino acids. These organic compounds are the building blocks of proteins, the basic stuff of life.
Miller’s results seemed to provide stunning evidence that life could arise out what the British chemist J.B.S. Haldane had called the “primordial soup.” Pundits speculated that scientists, like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, would shortly conjure up living organisms in their laboratories and thereby demonstrate in detail how genesis unfolded. It hasn’t worked out that way. In fact, almost 40 years after his original experiment, Miller told me that solving the riddle of the origin of life had turned out to be more difficult than he or anyone else had envisioned. He recalled one prediction, made shortly after his experiment, that within 25 years scientists would “surely” know how life began. “Well, 25 years have come and gone,” Miller said drily.
After his 1953 experiment, Miller had dedicated himself to the search for the secret of life. He developed a reputation as both a rigorous experimentalist and a bit of a curmudgeon, someone who is quick to criticize what he feels is shoddy work. When I met Miller in 1990 in his office at the University of California at San Diego, where he is a professor of biochemistry, he fretted that his field still has a reputation as a fringe discipline, not worthy of serious pursuit.