Everything about Stanley L Miller totally explained
Stanley Lloyd Miller (
March 7,
1930 -
May 20,
2007) was an
American chemist and
biologist who is known for his studies into the
origin of life, particularly the
Miller-Urey experiment which demonstrated that
organic compounds can be created by fairly simple physical processes from inorganic substances. The experiment used conditions then thought to provide an approximate representation of those present on the
primordial Earth.
Life and career
Born in
Oakland, California, he studied at
University of California (obtaining his B.S. in 1951) and then at
University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1954. While at Chicago, Miller was a student of
Harold Urey.
Miller continued his research at
California Institute of Technology (1954-1955) and then joined the department of biochemistry at
Columbia University, New York where he worked for the next five years. He then returned to California where he was an assistant professor (1960-1962), associate professor (1962-1968), then full professor of chemistry at
University of California, San Diego (from 1968).
His work dealt with the origin of life (and he was considered a pioneer in the field of
exobiology), the natural occurrence of
clathrate hydrates, and general mechanisms of
anesthesia. He was a member of the
National Academy of Science, and received the
Oparin Medal. He was a participant in the pioneering
Miller-Urey experiment. In the 1950s, Urey guessed that the early atmosphere of the Earth was probably like the atmosphere now present on Jupiter --for example, rich in ammonia, methane, and hydrogen. Miller, working in his laboratory at the University of Chicago, demonstrated that when exposed to an energy source such as ultraviolet radiation, these compounds and water can react to produce amino acids essential for the formation of living matter. (Similar ideas had been suggested by
Aleksandr Oparin in the 1920s.) Since then there have been objections that the early environment was possibly not as reducing as Miller and Urey assumed and Miller acknowledged this.
In 1828
Friedrich Wohler had showed that it's possible to synthesize
urea. As urea is an organic molecule, many at the time thought it could only be made by living organisms. This led to recognition that there's no obvious difference between a physically produced and an organically produced molecule. Miller's experiment went slightly further by showing that basic biomolecules can be formed through simple physical processes, and that it wasn't impossible for the first stages of
abiogenesis to have occurred on the early earth.
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