Miller’s Primordial Soup — Testing the Origin of Life
How Stanley Miller’s experiment changed the course of OL science
The visionary…
In 1924, half a dozen years before Prof. Stanley Lloyd Miller was born, a Soviet botanist and biochemist named Alexander Oparin published an influential book called The Origin of Life. In his book Oparin speculated that Life arose from purely chemical processes, starting with very basic and simple gases including methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water. These were the hypothesized gases in our Earth’s early atmosphere.
According to Oparin, the gases initially reacted to form simple organic molecules, which gradually gained complexity and new properties. These non-living, increasingly complex chemicals followed a Darwinian process of competition and natural selection and accumulated in the primitive ocean to form a primordial soup. The chemicals self-organized within this soup, and eventually formed the first proto-cell. Oparin believed these processes occurred throughout the Universe, not just on Earth.
Some of the details, large and small, in Oparin’s hypothesis are no longer held…
