Can you imagine making such a momentous breakthrough at such a young age?

Context: When Stanley Miller was only 22 years old, he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Under the supervision of Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey, he designed an experiment to simulate the environment of an early, pre-life Earth as closely as possible. After leaving it running for only a couple of days, they came back to discover that inside the chamber had formed things like peptides, amino acids, and nucleic acids, the basic building blocks of life that, over a geological timescale, could very feasibly form organic life. Nucleic acids have been known, over time, to form themselves into RNA strands, essentially a single stranded DNA molecule. (There are other differences, but thats the biggest one)

That’s not exactly true, but his work is still important as it demonstrated that inorganic compounds could react and form into complicated organic compounds via plausibly natural phenomena. Stanley Miller’s experiment simulated what in 1953 was considered to be the approximation of earth’s early atmosphere, which at that time had estimated much larger levels of Ammonia and Methane than what the geologic record suggests. These specific compounds are reactive, so the fact he ran the experiment over a week and found a brown slurry of amino acids and organic compounds in the end makes sense. However, in 1953 this was huge. Before then there was this huge unknown about how complex organic chemistry could even have been created naturally in the first place, so the paradigm shift wasn’t in the fact he simulated exactly how life’s building blocks were made on earth, but that these complex organic compounds could even be created with natural phenomena. If you run the same experiment, but with the what is estimated to be the correct atmosphere, (instead of Ammonia, Methane, and Hydrogen it’s more CO2, Nitrogen, and Carbon monoxide) you create far fewer amino acids and other complex organic compounds, and much less complicated forms at that. These days the working theory for terrestrial abiogenesis is that it occurred in deep sea thermal vents in a mostly CO2 and Nitrogen atmosphere. Under such extreme water pressures and heat, chemistry just does things a little differently, and it’s more likely that those conditions created the first complex organic compounds for life on Earth than in the far less reactive CO2 and Nitrogen atmosphere.

At 22 I figured out how to funnel booze

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