SH1631

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From Old Vials, New Hints on Origin of Life

Introduction to Life Science
Directions: Read the selection carefully, then answer the questions that follows.

By Kenneth Chang

A classic experiment exploring the origin of life has,

more than a half-century later, yielded new results.

In 1953, Stanley L. Miller, then a graduate student of

Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, put
ammonia, methane and hydrogen — the gases
believed to be in early Earth’s atmosphere — along
with water in a sealed flask and applied electrical
sparks to simulate the effects of lightning. A week
later, amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, The original samples used by Stanley Miller to study the origins of life.
were generated out of the simple molecules.

Enshrined in high school textbooks, the Miller-Urey experiment raised expectations that scientists
could unravel the origins of life with simple chemistry experiments.

The excitement has long since subsided. The amino acids never grew into the more complex
proteins. Scientists now think the composition of air on early Earth was much different from what
Dr. Miller used, leading some to question whether the Miller-Urey experiment had any relevance to
the still unsolved problem of the origin of life.

After Dr. Miller’s death in May last year, Dr. Jeffrey L. Bada of the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography in San Diego, who had been one of Dr. Miller’s graduate students, discovered
cardboard boxes containing hundreds of vials of dried residues collected from the experiments
conducted in 1953 and 1954.

Consulting Dr. Miller’s notebooks, Dr. Bada discovered that Dr. Miller had constructed two
variations of the original apparatus. One simply used a different spark generator. The second injected
steam onto the sparks.

That caught Dr. Bada’s attention, because the addition of steam seemed to replicate what might have
existed in lagoons and tidal pools around volcanoes.

This spring, Adam P. Johnson, a graduate student at Indiana University who was visiting Dr. Bada’s
laboratory on an internship, jumped on the opportunity to work on the vials produced by an
experiment he had read about in high school textbooks, although the historic material did not look
remarkable. “There were just a brown residue at the bottom of an old vial,” Mr. Johnson said.

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In his 1953 paper, Dr. Miller reported that he had detected five amino acids produced by the original
apparatus. Mr. Johnson's work, using modern techniques, revealed small amounts of nine additional
amino acids in those samples. In the residues from the apparatus with the steam injector, the
scientists detected 22 amino acids including 10 that had never been identified before from the Miller-
Urey experiment.

“It just opens our eyes,” Dr. Bada said. “It’s still revealing new things. What else is there that we
haven’t found out from this experiment?”

The findings by Mr. Johnson, Dr. Bada and other collaborators appears in Friday’s issue of the journal
Science.

Although scientists no longer think that the early atmosphere resembled the gases Dr. Miller used,
the gases released by volcanic eruptions do have similar properties. The scientists hypothesize that
the sparks split apart water molecules in the steam, enabling a wider range of chemical reactions to
take place.

In recent years, as the Miller-Urey experiment subsided in importance, scientists suggested places
like the ocean bottom as more likely locations for the origin of life. The discovery of amino acids in
meteorites suggested that the building blocks of life came from space, eliminating the need for
finding chemical processes that could produce them on Earth.

But, Dr. Bada said, the amount of amino acids that could have rained from the skies is still unclear,
and the tidal pools would have been a place where the amino acids could have accumulated in
concentrations, enabling more complex reactions to occur.

“My take on this is you want to consider everything,” Dr. Bada said. “If you can have a home grown
synthesis, perhaps by this mechanism we’ve described here, complemented by stuff falling from
space, well, you’ve got a really rich inventory of compounds to work with and set the stage for the
origin of life.”

Article Questions:

1. What would a proponent of Dr. Miller say about his experiment today? What would a critic
say about it?
2. Why did the addition of steam to the experiment by Dr. Miller interest Dr. Jeffrey L. Bada?
3. What did Dr. Bada and Adam Johnson discover in the “brown residue at the bottom of an old
vial?” Why was it significant?
4. What other places have been suggested as likely locations for the origin of life and why? Do
you agree or disagree with Dr. Bada’s assessment that “you want to consider everything,” and
why or why not?

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Rubric:

CRITERIA POINTS
States specific and relevant pieces of evidence
supporting the given explanation; and have no 5
grammatical, spelling, and punctuation error.
States pieces of evidence that support the given
explanation; and have no grammatical, spelling, and 4
punctuation error.
States pieces of evidence that support the given
explanation; and have only minimal grammatical, 3
spelling, and punctuation errors.
Some pieces of evidence do not support the stated
explanation; and have minimal grammatical, spelling, 2
and punctuation errors.
The explanations stated do not answer the given
question and have minimal grammatical, spelling, and 1
punctuation errors.
No answer at all 0

References
Chang, K. (2008, October 21). The Learning Network . Retrieved from The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20081021tuesday.html

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