Originin of Life: Created or Evolved?

Stanley Miller, Who Examined Origins of Life, Dies at 77
By NICHOLAS WADEPublished: May 23, 2007

Stanley L. Miller, a scientist whose spectacular discovery as a young graduate student pioneered the study of the origin of life on earth, died Sunday at a hospital near his home in National City, Calif. He was 77.

The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Donald Miller.
Dr. Miller was known for a classic experiment that he performed as a graduate student and published in 1953. The experiment showed how amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could easily be generated from the simple chemicals assumed to have been present on the primitive earth.

The finding caught the imagination of scientists everywhere by suggesting that it might soon be possible to reconstruct the emergence of the first living cells from the soup of chemicals generated by natural conditions on the early earth. Dr. Miller had opened an experimental approach toward one of the hardest remaining problems in biology.

He spent much of the rest of his scientific career at the University of California, San Diego, doing elaborations of his famous experiment and showing how more and more of the basic chemicals used by living cells could have arisen under natural conditions. But despite the brilliant beginning, neither he nor others were able to take the next step, that of providing a plausible mechanism by which these chemicals could have been assembled into living cells or the macromolecules — DNA and proteins — on which cells depend.

In the last decade, a rival theory, advocated by the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser and others, held that Dr. Miller’s approach was a blind alley. Dr. Wächtershäuser argued that life was more likely to have arisen in the exotic conditions near volcanoes, driven by metal catalysts, not in the more natural conditions simulated in Dr. Miller’s experiments.Dr. Miller, defending his approach, said that his rival’s theory was “overblown” and that it failed to show how copious amounts of amino acids could be produced, as he had done.