All good geeks...

Another old item but to cool to let pass.

Back in 1953, graduate student Stanley Miller and his advisor Harold Urey ran what became a very famous experiment. Methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water - believed at the time to be the major components of the early Earth's atmosphere - were placed in a closed system and subject to electric sparks intended to simulate lightning.

At the end of one week, Miller observed that as much as 10-15% of the carbon was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed some of the amino acids which are used to make proteins.

It was the possibility of an experimentally-demonstrated, entirely naturalistic/materialistic, origin for life on Earth.

Unfortunately, relatively soon afterward scientists came to believe that the mix of gases used was actually nothing like the early atmosphere of Earth, that instead that atmosphere, like that of Venus and Mars, was dominated by carbon dioxide. And so, while remaining iconic, the importance of the experiments faded.

But lo and behold there is, pardon the pun (it's the BBC's), "a new spark of life" in the experiments.

When Stanley Miller died in May last year, his former student, Jeffrey Bada, inherited his materials; including, it turns out, several boxes containing vials of dried samples from those 1950s experiments, and the accompanying notebooks.

"We started going through some of the stuff that was piled up in the corner, and here were several little cardboard boxes, taped shut and all dusty, carefully labelled with all of these little vials with dried material from his experiments," Professor Bada, of the University of California, San Diego, told the BBC. ...

Miller had revised [the initial] experiments by injecting hot steam into the gas mixture, so that conditions resembled those you might find in an erupting volcano.

The importance here is that while the overall atmosphere might not have looked much like that used in Miller's initial experiments,

conditions locally in volcanoes, says Professor Bada, might not have been so different. The trouble was, Miller published only the sketchiest of details of those tests, and the apparatus was lost. It had looked like a dead end, until those dusty boxes turned up with their 200 vials. ...

"[W]e found a whole collection, almost a complete collection, of the extract samples from the volcanic experiments. And so we just went at it, using the state-of-the-art techniques we have today and analysed these samples."

Not only did they find more amino acids than in the original, but they found a greater diversity of them as well: Miller found five amino acids; Bada's teams found 22.

What's more, the new results serve to answer one of the criticisms of the original experiment, that it used constant sparking and lightning storms are not constant at any point. However, volcanic eruptions are usually accompanied by violent electric storms and the same could have been true way back when.

"And so each one of those volcanoes could have been a little, local prebiotic factory[", Bada said. "]And so all of that went into making the material that we refer to as the prebiotic soup."

You want more? Two studies from 2005 concluded that the early Earth atmosphere was not dominated by carbon dioxide. One said it was up to 40% hydrogen

implying a more favorable climate for the production of pre-biotic organic compounds like amino acids,

and the other argued that

the early Earth's atmosphere was a reducing one, chock full of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor,

much more like that in the early Miller/Urey experiment.

Footnote the One: Admirably, Urey declined to be named as a co-author on the original paper because it would result in Miller, as a mere graduate student, not getting the credit he deserved. Instead, he pushed to get it published.

Footnote the Two: Just in case anyone is wondering, this has nothing to do with evolution, which concerns itself with how life changes and adapts, not with how it began. The study here is called abiogenesis (which literally means life without birth, i.e., life arising from non-life). And for those who follow such things, I say that panspermia does not resolve the question, it merely displaces it.

Footnote the Three: For any of you who try to suss out from where the titles of geek post come: While the overall pattern becomes fairly obvious over time, this one may be a bit subtle. So look here.