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

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

[laughing_badger]

It really shouldn't be a shock that you recieved a high mark.

Education should provoke thought. Just training kids to pass tests is of no value. What you did, analysing your results and thinking about _why_ you got them shows far more 'talent' than someone who just repeated an experiment that is guaranteed to give good results.

Sigh! Rant over. It is just crushing to see very little evidence of people designing their science lessons to impart the ability to think, like the guy who wrote Clouds in a Glass of Beer did.

Re:Ah, but does he mention that his amino acids...

[Anonymous Coward]

The significant thing is that Miller was able to produce amino acids in the first place. leonbrooks is using the classic fundamentalist creationist tactic of taking a scientific success and portraying it as a failure because the experiment did not meet 100% of the artificial requirements that he has generated for it.

This is the same thought process that causes them to say "Evolution can't possibly be true because there is a missing link between species A and species C," and then when species B is discovered, they say "Aha! Now you have even bigger problems, because there is no link between A and B, and B and C!" :-)