Primordial Soup: Interview with Stanley Miller

An anonymous reader writes "Stanley Miller's classic 'primordial soup' experiments showed that 13 of the 21 amino acids necessary for life could be made in a glass flask. For its fifty-year commemoration, Miller is interviewed today and reflects on what Carl Sagan called 'the single most significant step in convincing many scientists that life is likely to be abundant in the cosmos.'"

Comments

Land Sharks

[Scoria]

showed that 13 of the 21 amino acids necessary for life could be made in a glass flask

Of course, certain products of his experiments often indicate that not all of them are necessary. These products are, of course, "intellectual property lawyers." :-)

Pepto to the rescue

[tundog]

I stopped eating primordial soup because the amino acids keep giving me heartburn.

Re:I tried this experiment in high school...sort o

[archeopterix]

It hardly needs saying, but in a week I didn't make any amino acids I could detect.

My high school experiment results were quite different - I had to throw the jar into a volcano after the evolved organisms created a civilization and started working on a technology to break the jar and take over the Earth. At least that's what I wrote in my paper. My mark was also quite different, and needless to say I wasn't very happy with it.