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Sludge In Flask Gives Clues To Origin of Life
sciencehabit writes "In the 1950s, scientist Stanley Miller conducted a series of experiments in which he zapped gas-filled flasks with electricity. The most famous of these, published in 1952, showed that such a process could give rise to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But a later experiment, conducted in 1958, sat on the shelf--never analyzed by Miller. Now, scientists have gone back and analyzed the sludge at the bottom of this flask and found even more amino acids than before--and better evidence that lightning and volcanic gasses may have helped create life on Earth."
Didn't he leave a Twinkie sitting on the shelf too? (And scientists found fewer amino acids than ever before!)
* Goes off running to go show this to his creationist "friends"...*
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
and say "NA! NA! NOT LISTENING!"
But don't let that stop you.
I was going to say "How do they know there was no contamination?", but TFA states that equal amounts of right handed and left handed organic molecules were found, ruling out contamination as a source of the amino acids.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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Journal entry: Lightning and volcanic gases... gotta get outta here.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
But how is it that lightning formed amino acids found they're way deep among the deep ocean floor, and in large enough quantities for life to have formed and survive?
Two words: shit sinks
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I have very little doubt about the accuracy of this article or the findings of those who've reexamined Miller's work. My question is, why aren't we actively reproducing the results of this experiment and others like it? I can find very little mention of any recent studies like this, despite how much potential such experimentation would have in opening up entirely new fields of research.
That could really put a spin on things. Evolution ~ Creationism. Humm...
It took hundreds of millions of years and a lab the size of a planet to do it the first time. It may take more than a few decades to reproduce that.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
If examining sludge in a 50-year old flask can give clues to the origin of life, just imagine what scientists could learn by examining the inside of my fridge!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Biology is not my area of expertise, but I have to wonder why we haven't managed to "create life" yet (or have we?).
I create life every morning. Unfortunately it usually goes swirling down the shower drain.
Jc venter is very close to synthetic life where all things in the lifeform are synthrtic. As for what you asked earlier, many people have replicated the work. You have to look to find... yahoo news isn't about to publish astory where someone repeated something... get me?
In the fifties, when these experiments was set in motion, it had just recently been proven that DNA was the mechanism by which cells passed on their programming to their offspring. Prior to that, the common belief was that proteins did all the work, and that DNA was just a structural fibre like cellulose. Today, we're strongly of the opinion that not only was protein less relevant to early life, but probably completely irrelevant, as we've determined that RNA can perform the role of both DNA (information storage) and proteins (enzymes and structure). Evidence suggests that it once performed both of these roles exclusively, and that DNA and proteins evolved because they were tools better-suited to certain tasks.
THEREFORE: the availability of amino acids isn't relevant to the origin of life; only that they're around later for higher life forms to evolve. We really need to worry about the availability of ribonucleotides. The idea that we need to worry about the availability of amino acids only comes later.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Why did there have to be a single point of origin?
Archaea are very different from other extant organisms, why couldn't some extremophiles have evolved down at the vents or in the crust while others did up near the surface?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea
1- Create life- done.; the polio virus has been synthetically produced from nothing more then amino acid chains, an electron microscope and a lot of patience. The scary part will be when either the technology becomes easy enough to synthetically produce complex life, or someone designs a virus that has never been seen before. It of course relies on this experiment to explain where those amino acids came from to first go together to make things, and the polio virus is several orders of magnitude simpler then even the simplest truly autonomous lifeform.
2-Why not repeat this experiment: Complexity, cost, time, reason:
Complexity- doing this experiment the first time took a researcher 25 years of his life zapping assorted vials of sludge with electricity before he could find a result among them, while some of this can be automated; it would still be a VERY complex experiment taking thousands of man hours to repeat
Cost- Thousands of man hours for a reasearch scientists tranlates to a significant chunk of money.
Time- and it could take 25 years, or more, to get the same result. Further, the current theroy of evolution is such that it took perhaps real world thousands of years for those amino acids to build anything useful by random chance; so outside of the create life experiment where reasearchers took an existing string of amino acids and built an existing 'life' (virii populating a weird place of 'not quite alive'); so it would take millions of bottles of sludge sitting on shelves for thousands of years before you had true autonomous life in them (by which time it may have starved to death by depleting its own resources).
Reason- Baring plugging your fingers in your ears and pretending this experiment never took place no one has ever found fault with the experiment which proved that it is in fact possible to build amino acids from primordial sluge energized by electricity akin to that generated by thunderstorms, except to say 'it's been done TWICE' to the same people who refuse to believe that it's been done once what possible purpose would this serve?
There might actually be a health concern behind that, if that is so. Suggests that your body is not metabolizing fat well.
In legal terms, there is the concept of "chain of evidence" meaning that the material has not left authorized hands, nor sat on a shelf unattended for 53 years. If this was a murder trial, that "chain of evidence" would be completely broken. If this is required to prove the death of someone, it surely must apply to prove the "life" of something.
That article sucks horribly they missed such a huge opportunity for jokes if only they had called it ooze instead of sludge.
Really it does. It's just you're so full of it, it fills the bowl. It only looks like it's on top of the water.
No sig for you!!
Early earth was a reducing environment, not an oxidizing one.
I managed to create life - in fact I did it twice. All I needed was my willing wife and 9 months each time. Come to think about it, I'm not sure that the "willing" part would be that important either.
Proof doesn't work that way in science. 'Proof' isn't really a scientific concept. Disproved is common in science though.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Your analogy is broken...
This is more like finding worms eating a corpse, and then saying it's proof that the worms must have been there when the person was living.
They're actually very similar, in the grand scheme of things. They're DNA and RNA based, use the same amino acids (or at least, almost exactly the same) etc. There was a common ancestor between archaea and all known life, so far as I know.
It's quite possible that life evolved twice, or more than twice. The trick would be recognizing it when we see it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_biosphere
We haven't revisited it because there's really no point.
The conditions on ancient Earth were, basically, various different permutations on this experiment repeated over and over again in a million trillion gallons of water (i.e, the entirety of the liquid water present on this planet) for several million years. The Miller-Urey experiment was conducted in order to demonstrate feasibility, and it did so; in conditions similar to what we think the ancient Earth looked like, the basic building blocks of life would have been present.
Why revisit it? We can't go much further than they did; after all, it's not like we've got a lot of water in which to conduct this experiment over and over again for a long period of time; and even if we did, all we'd get out of it are some self-replicating molecules that we probably already know about.
The original experiment showed that it was feasible. With what we know about organic chemistry (this stuff is so simple it doesn't even qualify as biology), self-replication and thence natural selection are both inevitable, once you have feasibility, time and space. The original experiment proved we have the former, and geology proves we have the latter. QED.
The only reason why this is being revisited right now is because there's a lot of Americans who don't actually believe in abiogenesis, and thus there's some funding available to try and convince them.
(not that any amount of evidence will change their minds, because the root of their disbelief doesn't lie in a lack of evidence)
Biochemist and Ohio U Ph.D. Fuz Rana in Creating Life in the Lab makes a strong case that a basic life form created by scientists is approximately a decade away.
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Life-Lab-Discoveries-Synthetic/dp/0801072093
The article points to a few methods the amino acids could be produced in nature, (including underwater vents) and the experiment seems to back that up. So given that amino acids are not that hard to produce, the question of life isn't what caused the amino acids to form (because similar conditions exist on other planets in our own solar system and beyond.) The question is what caused the amino acids to begin to form the complex chains that actually are life.
A simple protein can be made from as few as 50 or as many as several thousand amino acids, and they must all be put together in a specific order. The average functional protein contains 200 amino acids. The simple cell contains thousands of different proteins. The probability of just one protein contain just 100 amino acids forming by itself is a mind boggling huge number. Oh, and you need RNA first before you can make a protein, yet proteins are used to make RNA...
Lot of claims there, with no evidence presented for support.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
In legal terms, there is the concept of "chain of evidence" meaning that the material has not left authorized hands, nor sat on a shelf unattended for 53 years. If this was a murder trial, that "chain of evidence" would be completely broken. If this is required to prove the death of someone, it surely must apply to prove the "life" of something.
If you have a corpse, and you can identify who it is, but you don't know where it was for a little while, you're no longer sure that that person is dead?
I think the point must be that since we don't know what was going on with the flask during all those years, God could have easily slipped in and planted those amino acids!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Ah yes...
Thunder and lightning.. oh yeah
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Possibly when the earth was young and hot there was greater volcanic activity and so hydrothermal vents were not as deep as they are now? Also maybe earth had less water back then and so shallower oceans.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
... no person who believes in God can possibly be fascinated by what this scientist has discovered, right?
No person who believes in God can be anything other than a raving lunatic fanatic because ...
Some fundamentalist atheists might claim that. And they often do so on /. But this time you jumped the gun. The claim was only that some religious people refuse to listen to anything scientific unless they just made it up themselves.
I'm of the understanding that the origin of life can be traced back (in theory) to hydrothermal vents deep within the ocean.
No, it can't be traced back to any origin. Hydrothermal vents represent one of many conjectures of what kind of environment let it happen.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
One of the major reasons has to do with safety. The Miller experiment was done in a closed system of glassware that was under pressure from heat and sparks (albeit having a condenser). I got my PhD in a lab next door to Jeffrey Bada's lab (one of the authors and a former student of Miller's). So I used to use Prof. Bada's lab for their NH3 tank for Birch reduction, etc (our lab was not equipped with a liquid NH3 tank for EHS reasons), and I remember thinking there's no way I'd want to be close to this glassware if the Miller experiment was repeated especially given the presence of H2, etc. When you look at the video footage of Miller with the glassware, you'll notice he wasn't even wearing safety goggles. Chemists used to have a completely different mentality back then. For instance, some of my mentors used to smoke cigarettes right next to a squirt bottle of diethyl ether "back in the days". Today, it's unthinkable!!!
Regardless, this experiment is still irrelevant because those gases Miller used (H2S, H2, NH3, CO2, esp.) cannot coexist in the same place for any appreciable amount of time. Gases like CO2 would not exist without a significant amt of O2, but H2S, H2, NH3, etc (and the amino acid products) would be quickly oxidized at elevated temp in the presence of O2. Moreover, if O2 was absent, unfiltered UV radiation (w/out O2, no O3 layer) would also quickly destroy those reducing gases and amino acid products.
Some were yelling one thing, some another. Most of them had no idea what was going on or why they were there. Acts19:32
I'm curious as to whether these results have been revisited--or replicated--since the 1950s. This article seems to indicate that people have been talking about the experiment without really revisiting the science for more than half a century.
I don't know why no one else has done it, but for my money it's not very interesting anymore. We've since discovered that amino acids form even in deep space. It's just organic chemistry. The interesting question is how do we narrow down all the conjectures about how life might have gotten started, to the one(s) that actually happened.
Biology is not my area of expertise, but I have to wonder why we haven't managed to "create life" yet (or have we?).
I haven't read anything about it for a few years, but we're probably within a few years of it. Several well-funded teams have been working on it.
However, AFAIK none of them are working on life "as we know it". They're just taking the common biological definition (metabolism, reproduction, etc.) and trying to build a minimal chemical system that does it.
Somewhere I've seen a chart of the reactions one team had designed, but as of then they didn't have all of it actually working.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
There are plenty of repeats of this - they just don't bother publishing them because there isn't much new to learn.
In fact, we repeated a version of the Urey-Miller experiment in my undergraduate biology lab independent project. The hard pard was going around bumming free equipment (high voltage transformer from the EE dept, balloons of elementary gases from the chemistry dept, even the help of a very cool tech in the physics dept who helped us make a simple spark gap chamber out of a glass bottle, a couple tungsten rods, and a blowtorch).
The goal was to repeat a few times with slightly different starting materials, and see what different amino acids we could find. Unfortunately, we managed to blow up the custom made spark bottle on the second run; someone dropped it and caused a hairline crack after the first run, and that let enough oxygen get in after we (not-so-successfully) evacuated it to cause a nice little explosion after turning on the spark gap. Luckily we were careful enough to put it under an enclosed fume hood ;)
In the end it was more an exersice in begging for supplies than novel science. But that was probably a lot more useful skill to learn for a budding researcher than how to inseminate a sea urchin...
1- Create life- done.; the polio virus has been synthetically produced
I was astonished to learn that biologists don't consider viruses to be "life". They don't meet some of the criteria of the common definition(s) of life.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As one would expect, there have been many similar experiments performed since the original Miller-Urey experiment. This is partly because the views about constitution of atmosphere and other primordial conditions have changed since those days.
What Venter is doing is trying to solve the problem from the other end, trying to replicate something very much like existing life forms, using DNA, but made entirely from non-living materials. The first replicators would be far, far simpler than what he wants to do.
Both are important work, but the latter is what people have in mind when they talk about creating life from scratch. Venter's experiment will prove that an intelligent designer can create a complex life form, but it doesn't prove that it can arise without one.
What you really want is to start with Miller-Urey and keep going until you've got bacteria, but that's a lot harder. We have guesses as to what the intermediate steps are, but nobody has a complete picture yet.
Disclaimer: i was a student under one of Miller's former post-docs. That doesn't mean I know much more than you.
From my understanding, the problems to be solved had to do with the misconception that organic molecules could only be made "organically." It was well known that life makes amino acids, fats, etc.; however, it was also well known that such things were done by the action of enzymes or other structures within living cells. So the question was more of a "how do we break the chicken-and-egg paradox?" instead of "can we reverse engineer exactly how life was created".
The fact that you could start off with inorganic materials and make organic building blocks without a living system processing them was the ground shaking breakthrough. Once you had that, then it's easy to conjecture that enough organic molecules would eventually build up that some of them would become self-organizing (and eventually resemble life). If some other technique was discovered to make organic molecules from inorganic, then the key missing link would still have been satisfied.
Complexity- doing this experiment the first time took a researcher 25 years of his life zapping assorted vials of sludge with electricity before he could find a result among them, while some of this can be automated; it would still be a VERY complex experiment taking thousands of man hours to repeat.
See my post above about my experience with this - but the gist is that this just isn't remotely true. It's not a trivial experiment to execute, but with the right equipment it's pretty straightforward to reproduce in a few days. It's just not worth it outside of a learning experience, precisely because it's so reproducible.
As far as Miller "spending 25 years of his life" and "thousands of hours of research" - what are you TALKING about? There is information on this all of the place, no need for wild guessing! Here's a quite from an article in Science from 2003 discussing the experiement:
"Miller began the experiments in the fall of 1952. By comparison with contemporary analytical tools, the paper chromatography method available at the time was crude. Still, after only 2 days of sparking the gaseous mixture, Miller detected glycine in the flask containing water. When he repeated the experiment, this time sparking the mixture for a week, the inside of the sparking flask soon became coated with an oily material and the water turned a yellow-brown color. Chromatographic analysis of the water flask yielded an intense glycine spot; several other amino acids were also detected."
FLUSH! FLUSH DAMN YOU!
And get some stink slayer in here. God! What crawled up inside of you and died?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No reason to believe the lightning had to come from the sky.
From my lips, as well as ETOH and H20.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Molecular oxygen was only released when the first living beings were able to either chemo- or to photosynthese oxygen. Until then the atmosphere was mainly nitrogen, water and carbondioxide.
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." Heinlein
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I suspect at least some reluctance to "play god" in the past and to "anger the fundies" nowadays inhibits research in this area.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God!
-- Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
In school we were taught that they weren't life, exactly, because they couldn't reproduce themselves, but IIRC there was a minority position that they were life nonetheless.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
They don't meet some of the criteria of the common definition(s) of life.
I know some biologists that don't meet some of the criteria. It's usually in the "reproduction" area where they have problems.
Support SETI@home
I, for one, welcome our new sludge overlords.
Sperm doesn't count since it is already alive. If you got an abortion every morning in the shower, then that would be far more impressive.
I said: "The idea of a god that is infinitely powerful, yet has a thought process similar to ours is ludicrous"
You said: "It is highly presumptuous to think that we could possibly imagine what a supernatural deity would think"
Yet from the general tone I feel like you disagree with me. Strange.
References?
It took hundreds of millions of years and a lab the size of a planet to do it the first time. It may take more than a few decades to reproduce that.
Actually, it took more like hundreds of millions of years and a lab _so big_ that individual units of experiment are measured in "planets".
Maybe best described as Petri dishes- but cosmic is size and scale. (not a typo, btw.)
And your creationist friends, if they are well informed, will laugh at both you and the poster for your lack of scientific knowledge. Miller's experiment was flawed. It was designed to shoot electricity through an atmosphere like the one on primitive Earth to see if life (or at least building blocks of it) might result. The atmosphere he chose was a hydrogen rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor. This was consistent with what scientists in the 50's thought the early atmosphere was like, and he relied heavily on the atmospheric theories of his doctoral advisor, Nobel laureate Harold Urey, when he designed his experiment.
The problem is, he picked the wrong atmosphere. There's no evidence that the atmosphere he picked resembled a primitive Earth atmosphere. By the 1970s the Miller-Urey atmosphere model was being declared dead by scientists like Belgian biochemist Marcel Florkin and others.Science magazine in 1995 said that experts now dismiss Miller's experiment because 'the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.' According to Dr. Jonathan Wells, 'the best scientific hypothesis now is that there was very little hydrogen in the atmosphere because it would have escaped into space. Instead, the atmosphere probably consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor.' And if you replay the experiment using this atmosphere instead of the Miller-Urey model, you get no amino acids. Instead, you get things like formaldehyde and cyanide... and those are NOT conducive to life.
Some of our textbooks may still be perpetuating this debunked theory (mine in high school did), but no modern scientists believe this experiment has any relationship to reality at all. And whatever sludge they have in those jars are equally useless, because it resulted from a flawed model. So don't run off and tell your creationist friends about your new "evidence", because if they've been following any research, they'll just laugh at you.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Your analogy is broken...
This is more like finding worms eating a corpse, and then saying it's proof that the worms must have been there when the person was living.
I can assure you that those samples were intact all these years. Besides, most of the samples were in vials and not in flasks. How do I know this personally? I did my PhD work in a lab right next to Jeffrey Bada's (see the paper, he's one of the main authors). I was there when he found these samples from their storage or something and told us all about it.
Also any amino acids that were in the vials must have been synthesized in the Miller's apparatus since there was no starting materials left in those vials (remember the S.M. were gases). Even so this experiment is still irrelevant to the origin of life for the reasons I've discussed in another comment of mine (see below).
Regardless, this experiment is still irrelevant because those gases Miller used (H2S, H2, NH3, CO2, esp.) cannot coexist in the same place for any appreciable amount of time. Gases like CO2 would not exist without a significant amt of O2, but H2S, H2, NH3, etc (and the amino acid products) would be quickly oxidized at elevated temp in the presence of O2. Moreover, if O2 was absent, unfiltered UV radiation (w/out O2, no O3 layer) would also quickly destroy those reducing gases and amino acid products.
Some were yelling one thing, some another. Most of them had no idea what was going on or why they were there. Acts19:32
If creationists followed any research at all, they wouldn't be creationists. Instead, they have a selective filter on the knowledge they gain, and cling to objections that were answered in the 1800s.
But yes. The Miller experiment didn't get the atmosphere right (probably - there are labs that still debate this). But that doesn't do much to lessen the impact of the experiment - organic compounds still form easily under a variety of conditions. Later work has shown that the universe has quite a bit of them hanging around on the odd comet and so on. Even if the atmosphere was wrong (which it probably is, but again, there are some labs that debate this) organics formed much easier than anyone thought before that point.
Creationist means that they believe in a creator.
Not generally, no. Creationist means (to most people) that the bible is the story of how things were made by God. And I don't recall a Big Bang theory or evolution in there anywhere.
Just to play Devil's advocate..."Let there be Light." I agree about the evolution part though. I don't know if there is a 'Creator' or not and can't pretend to, but both sides of the debate have their zealots.
Hell we could be the thesis project of some extra dimensional alien intelligence for all I know. Still, "Let there be Light" sounds an awful lot like a big bang (or big flash) to me.
People need to Mod this up.
Creationists (and other ill minded ilk) seem to miss that this was the big revolution not just for abiogenesis. Suddenly organic compounds were in easy reach of inorganic reactions. This was really relevant for both biologists interested in the origin of life, but also people interested in organic chemistry basic research at the time. I was 'introduced' to this experiment twice in college - the first time was in biology, where you'd expect. But the second time was in organic chemistry.
but sperm is created continuously, while a woman is born with her lifetime supply of eggs
Actually, RNA by itself is enough for life. It can serve in place of DNA for information storage, and replace proteins for enzymes and structure. DNA and amino acids have their advantages, but neither is strictly necessary in the beginning; they can be added later.
The idea that early life was RNA-based, rather than DNA-based, is known as the RNA World Hypothesis.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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couldn't a safer version of the experiment be done with a more "dilute" version in mostly nitrogen?
why was there a need to be taught how to inseminate a sea urchin, it's simple really, just take care you don't prick your prick on the pricks
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You know why it's bad to start your post's text in the subject?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
anything is going to have signs of life in it!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Perhaps this so called 'sludge' is not really sludge at all. I believe that is is actually sauce, sauce from the Flying Spaghetti Monster itself. And being a sauce, this gives us believers in the FSM more actual evidence for its existence, than the magic man in the sky.
Glory to the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I was looking for this post :) Everyone should at least have an understanding of the argument.
Also remember that only 12 grams of carbon contains 6*10^23 carbon atoms, and the processes that formed these chemicals went on for billions of years. On those sorts of scales, even mind-bogglingly small probabilities become almost certainties.
You are just 0.00000001% of the way home to a compelling Origin of Life scenario.
You need to get a self-replicating chemical process with metabolism that is able to stick around prior to degradation. Not to mention all left-handed amino acids and numerous other obstacles I haven't even begun to mention. Your average run-of-the-mill Young Earth Creationist can see right through this.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
God is just as real as any other metaphor. What does that have to do with science?
...that this sludge has given me clues to the origin of life, but I can say certainly that life has given me clues to the origin of this sludge.
Don't know, we didn't get to try very many variations, since the last one involved plenty of methane and hydrogen gas...
And actually, inseminating sea urchins is really more a matter of squeezing them to release the eggs and then fertilizing the eggs afterwards, so you have to have pretty good aim and a really small "pipette"... was never very good at it myself ;)
Yeah, that's true, and I think what people really misunderstand about this experiment (beyond the fact that this is NOT an example of evolution, it's the first potential step of abiogenesis!) is that it's not about the EXACT precursors used.
So many of the arguments against it (mostly from creationists picking and choosing their sources) claim "those weren't the early Earth conditions" (like ANYONE knows the conditions of every possible climate on Earth 4 billion years ago, when we are still finding new ones that support life today!). The experiment was a proof of concept that VERY simple precursors and conditions could create amino acids in a matter of days (and in fact led to similar experiments that created adenine, ie. one of the nucleotides in RNA and DNA). At the very least it gives those working on the next steps you mention - how were RNA and proteins first formed - a plausible assumption of availability of some amino acids and nucleotides...
Things are getting a bit more interesting with the recent findings of foreign bg-algae on that asteroid as well. I know what venter is doing, and its pretty jawdropping to think about..... he would have been done a long time ago if the goal was to make replicating proteins like mad cow's disease.
I don't think we have the time it takes to go from chemicals, heat, and electricity, to anything resembling a life form... heck, we could take living organisms, put the mixture in a blender, breaking down to the whole library of monomers/polymers and we probably wouldn't observe the extremely unlikely event where some of it might form a 'living' organism.
In all cases, biology is amazing and its nice to see people out there with the same thirst.
What are you talking about it took an underpaid lab assistant and a lab the size of earth and he was so incompetent he had to work on Saturday and only had Sunday off.
If they take their religion literally, I give them much respect. They are still wrong but at least they are true to their beliefs.
But being true to their beliefs does not mean their beliefs are true. And while I can respect individuals there is no reason to respect systems of ideas, especially when these are demonstrably false.
What part of the new testament [snip] states that the point is to live well with your neighbor?
"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." - Mathew 7:12
The problem with today's armchair religious historians is that they make assertions such as these which fly in the face reality.
I hope reality didn't knock you out of your armchair. ;)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well, to be precise, the synthesis of organic compounds from anorganic sources was nothing particularily new in the 50s. The first relevant synthesis was WÃhler's urea synthesis in 1828, that conclusively showed that organic chemistry is nothing special compared to anorganics. All the major reactions needed to get to amino acids from anorganic educts within a planned synthesis path were known in the 50s. The major thing was that it can happen at random, given the main ingredients, energy and surprisingly little time.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
From GGC: "I was there when he found these samples from their storage"
QED.
And BTW I was just joking.
Mostly harmless.
I suspect the "anger the fundies" problem is primarily a USA-centric issue, the rest of the modern world is probably working hard on this...
C17H21NO4
There is a youtube file I have not seen here: The Origin of Life - Abiogenesis - Dr. Jack Szostak. I am not a biologist, nether a chemist and not good in statistics, so I am not the person to evaluate this, but it seems to answer some of your questions.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I suspect the "anger the fundies" problem is primarily a USA-centric issue, the modern world is probably working hard on this...
There, FTFY.
-- Cheers!
Is this the same type of sludge that will come alive and give me a black spidey suit?
Or is this more the type to become huge, and start eating up a whole town, I got to know, before I fire up my beakers...and Bunsen burners
And they want me to pick up a piece of paper, Oh god, I'm so depressed... [/MARVIN]
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I realize that /. has become a forum for bashing anyone that disagrees with you, but really? Why did so many of you automatically assume this experiment as factual scientific evidence against creationists? The creation/evolution debate is actually quite irrelevant in this experiment because it can only prove that amino acids can form under the conditions of the experiment. Could it be true? Absolutely, and if it is, opens the door for the possibility of the spontaneous creation of amino acids. I'm intrigued by the experiment and its results, but this is far cry from any kind of proof or evidence on the origin of life and jumping to that conclusion only shows one's bias beliefs. We don't even know if this experiment is repeatable yet. One scientist (and his colleagues) performing two experiments means very little. In order to be valid, this experiment must be performed many times by different groups, all of which must get the same results. When this happens we can say with confidence that the gasses and electricity produce amino acids, thus the spontaneous generation of amino acids is not impossible. Don't be so quick to jump on the bandwagon of anything that might suggests someone else is wrong.
Bah, I can do it with a small pit and an above-average sized rod any night I want. It takes about nine months for the results, though.
All the comments in this thread are just a big flamewar over creationism and the like. While I am an atheist myself, I find it a bit sad that we're not discussing the technical details instead.