“UREY-MILLER

HYPOTHESIS”
PROPONENTS:
Harold Urey
Harold Urey was an American physicist and chemist who
came to prominence for his pioneering work on isotopes. He led
the discovery of the deuterium—a heavy form of hydrogen— that
earned him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934.

Stanley Lloyd Miller

Stanley Lloyd Miller (March 7, 1930 – May 20, 2007) was
an American chemist who made landmark experiments in the
origin of life by demonstrating that a wide range of vital organic
compounds can be synthesized by simple chemical processes from
inorganic substances.

GUIDE QUESTIONS:
1. What is the purpose of their experiment?
2. On what things we can use their experiment?
3. How did they come up with their hypothesis?
4. Where Urey and Miller’s result are meaningful?
EXPERIMENT:
 U.S scientists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller
in 1950’s Proposed that amino acids can be
 1950's, biochemists Stanley Miller and Harold
Urey, conducted an experiment to test Oparin
and Haldane’s ideas. which demonstrated that
several organic compounds could be formed
spontaneously by simulating the conditions of

Earth's early atmosphere.

They designed an apparatus which held a mix

of gases similar to those found in Earth's early
atmosphere over a pool of water, representing
Earth's early ocean. Electrodes delivered an electric current, simulating lightning,
into the gas-filled chamber. After allowing the experiment to run for one week, they
analyzed the contents of the liquid pool. They found that several organic amino
acids had formed spontaneously from inorganic raw materials. These molecules
collected together in the pool of water to form coacervates.

Their experiments, along with considerable geological, biological, and chemical

evidence, lends support to the theory that the first life forms arose spontaneously
through naturally occurring chemical reactions. However, there are still many
skeptics of this theory who remain unconvinced. British astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle,
compares the likelihood of life appearing on Earth by chemical reactions "as
equivalent to the possibility that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might
assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein".

The experiment used water (H2O), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), and
hydrogen (H2). The chemicals were all sealed inside a sterile 5-liter glass flask
connected to a 500 ml flask half-full of water. The water in the smaller flask was
heated to induce evaporation, and the water vapor was allowed to enter the larger
flask. Continuous electrical sparks were fired between the electrodes to simulate
lightning in the water vapor and gaseous mixture, and then the simulated
atmosphere was cooled again so that the water condensed and trickled into a U-
shaped trap at the bottom of the apparatus. The 1958 reaction – which also
incorporated carbon dioxide, a gas not included in the earlier experiment – created a
mix more like that which geoscientists now believe made up the atmosphere of
primordial Earth, Parker said.

The Miller-Urey Experiment was a landmark experiment to investigate the

chemical conditions that might have led to the origin of life on Earth. The scientist
Stanley Miller, under the supervision of the Nobel laureate scientist Harold Urey
conducted it in 1952 at the University of Chicago. They tried to recreate the
conditions that could have existed in the first billion years of the Earth’s existence
(also known as the Early Earth) to check the said chemical transformations.

The Miller-Urey Experiment in Support Of Abiogenesis

For those who are not conversant with the term, abiogenesis is the process
responsible for the development of living beings from non-living or abiotic matter.
It is thought to have taken place on the Earth about 3.8 to 4 billion years ago.
Modern abiogenesis hypotheses are based largely on the same principles as the
Oparin-Haldane theory and the Miller-Urey experiment. There are, however, subtle
differences between the several models that have been set forth to explain the
progression from abiogenic molecule to living organism, and explanations differ as
to whether complex organic molecules first became self-replicating entities lacking
metabolic functions or first became metabolizing protocells that then developed the
ability to self-replicate.

The habitat for abiogenesis has also been debated. While some evidence suggests
that life may have originated from nonlife in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor,
it is possible that abiogenesis occurred elsewhere, such as deep below Earth’s
surface, where newly arisen protocells could have subsisted on methane or
hydrogen, or even on ocean shores, where proteinoids may have emerged from the
reaction of amino acids with heat and then entered the water as cell-like protein
droplets.

Some scientists have proposed that abiogenesis occurred more than once. In one
example of this hypothetical scenario, different types of life arose, each with
distinct biochemical architectures reflecting the nature of the abiogenic materials
from which they developed. Ultimately, however, phosphate-based life (“standard”
life, having a biochemical architecture requiring phosphorus) gained an
evolutionary advantage over all non-phosphate-based life (“nonstandard” life) and
thereby became the most widely distributed type of life on Earth. This notion led
scientists to infer the existence of a shadow biosphere, a life-supporting system
consisting of microorganisms of unique or unusual biochemical structure that may
have once existed, or possibly still exists, on Earth. As the Miller-Urey experiment
demonstrated, organic molecules can form from abiogenic materials under the
constraints of Earth’s prebiotic atmosphere. Since the 1950s, researchers have
found that amino acids can spontaneously form peptides (small proteins) and that
key intermediates in the synthesis of RNA nucleotides (nitrogen-containing
compounds [bases] linked to sugar and phosphate groups) can form from prebiotic
starting materials. The latter evidence may support the RNA world hypothesis, the
idea that on early Earth there existed an abundance of RNA life produced through
prebiotic chemical reactions. In fact, in addition to carrying and translating genetic
information, RNA is a catalyst, a molecule that increases the rate of a reaction
without itself being consumed, meaning that a single RNA catalyst could have
produced multiple living forms, which would have been advantageous during the
rise of life on Earth. The RNA world hypothesis is one of the leading self-
replication-first conceptions of abiogenesis.

Some modern metabolism-based models of abiogenesis incorporate Oparin’s

enzyme-containing coacervates but suggest a steady progression from simple
organic molecules to coacervates, specifically photobionts, aggregates of organic
molecules that display some characteristics of life. Photobionts presumably then
gave rise to prokaryotes, single-celled organisms lacking a distinct nucleus and
other organelles because of the absence of internal membranes but capable of
metabolism and self-replication and susceptible to natural selection. Examples of
primitive prokaryotes still found on Earth today include archaea, which often
inhabit extreme environments with conditions similar to those that may have existed
billions of years ago, and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), which also flourish in
inhospitable environments and are of particular interest in understanding the origin
of life, given their photosynthetic abilities. Stromatolites, deposits formed by the
growth of blue-green algae, are the world’s oldest fossils, dating to 3.5 billion years
ago.

Chemistry of The Miller and Urey Experiment

The components of the mixture can react among themselves to produce
formaldehyde (CH2O), hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and other intermediate
compounds.
CO2 → CO + [O] (atomic oxygen)
CH4 + 2[O] → CH2O + H2O

CO + NH3 → HCN + H2O

CH4 + NH3 → HCN + 3H2

The ammonia, formaldehyde and HCN so produced react by a process known as

Strecker synthesis to form biomolecules including amino acids.
CH2O + HCN + NH3 → NH2-CH2-CN + H2O

NH2-CH2-CN + 2H2O → NH3 + NH2-CH2-COOH (glycine)

In addition to the above, formaldehyde and water can react by Butlerov’s reaction
to produce a variety of sugars like ribose, etc.

Though later studies have indicated that the reducing atmosphere as replicated by
Miller and Urey could not have prevailed on primitive Earth, still, the experiment
remains to be a milestone in synthesizing the building blocks of life under abiotic
conditions and not from living beings themselves.

Were Miller and Urey's results meaningful?

The experiment failed to explain how proteins were responsible for the
formation of amino acids. A few scientists have contradicted that the gases used by
Miller and Urey are not as abundant as shown in the experiment. They were of the
notion that the gases released by the volcanic eruptions such as oxygen, nitrogen,
and carbon dioxide make up the atmosphere. Therefore, the results are not reliable.

Scientists now think that the atmosphere of early Earth was different than in
Miller and Urey's setup (that is, not reducing, and not rich in ammonia and
methane). So, it's doubtful that Miller and Urey did an accurate simulation of
conditions on early Earth.
However, a variety of experiments done in the years since have shown that organic
building blocks (especially amino acids) can form from inorganic precursors under
a wide range of conditions. From these experiments, it seems reasonable to imagine
that at least some of life's building blocks could have formed abiotically on early
Earth. However, exactly how (and under what conditions) remains an open
question.

SOURCE:
www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/harold-urey-7284.php
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Miller
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/a-timeline-of-the-theory-of-spontaneous-generation
https://www.brainkart.com/article/ORIGIN-OF-LIFE---Theories_687/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
https://byjus.com/biology/miller-urey-experiment/
https://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Life/miller_urey.html
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/natural-selection/origins-of-life-on-
earth/a/hypotheses-about-the-origins-of-life
https://www.britannica.com/science/abiogenesis