Stanley Lloyd Miller (March 7, 1930 – May 20, 2007) was an American chemist who made a wide range of experiments, demonstrating that select organic compounds can be synthesized by chemical processes from inorganic substances. In 1952 he performed the Miller–Urey experiment, which showed that complex organic molecules could be synthesised from inorganic precursors. The experiment was widely reported.
Life and career Stanley Miller was born in Oakland, California. He was the second child (after a brother, Donald) of Nathan and Edith Miller, descendants of Jewish immigrants from Belarus and Latvia. His father was an attorney and served as Oakland Deputy District Attorney in 1927. His mother was a school teacher so that education was a natural environment in the family. In fact, while in Oakland High School he was nicknamed "a chem whiz." He followed his brother to the University of California at Berkeley to study chemistry mainly because he felt that Donald would be able to help him with the topic. He completed his B.S. in June 1951. When his father died in 1946, his family experienced financial challenges. With help from Berkeley faculty members (Berkeley did not then grant research assistantships), he received a teaching assistantship at the University of Chicago in February 1951. Teaching would provide the basic funds for graduate work. Miller enrolled in the University of Chicago PhD program in September 1951. He searched frantically for a thesis topic, met professors, and preferred theoretical problems rather than experiments, which tended to be laborious. He initially worked with the theoretical physicist Edward Teller on synthesis of elements. Conforming to the custom of the university, which was that graduate students attend seminars, he attended a chemistry seminar by Nobel laureate Harold Urey on the origin of solar system and the idea that organic synthesis was possible in a reducing environment, such as the primitive Earth's atmosphere. Miller was immensely inspired. After a year of fruitless work with Teller, and the prospect of Teller's leaving Chicago to work on the hydrogen bomb, Urey approached Miller in September 1952 with a fresh research project. Urey was not immediately enthusiastic about Miller's interest in pre-biotic synthesis: no successful work had been done. Urey suggested that Miller work on thallium in meteorites. With persistence, Miller persuaded Urey to experiment with electric discharges in gases. The experiments found evidence for the production of amino acids in the reaction vessel. Urey or Miller was afraid that specks of fly excrement might be the source of the amino acids (or was so chided by classmates). Excrement was not the source; the result was a demonstration that "organic" chemical compounds could be produced by purely inorganic processes. Miller earned a doctorate in 1954, and a long-lasting reputation. From spectroscopic observations of stars, it is now well known that complex organic compounds form from the gases of carbon-rich stars. The fundamental issue, the connection between "pre-biotic organic" compounds and the origin of life, has remained. After completing a doctorate, Miller was a F. B. Jewett Fellow at the California Institute of Technology in 1954 and 1955. There, he worked on the mechanism involved in the synthesis of amino and hydroxycarboxylic acids. He then joined the Department of Biochemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, where he worked for the next five years. When the new University of California at San Diego was established, he became the first assistant professor of the Department of Chemistry in 1960, and an associate professor in 1962, and then a full Professor in 1968. He supervised 8 PhD students including Jeffrey L. Bada. He also co-authored the book "The Origin of Life on Earth."
Miller's experiment
The Miller experiment was described in his technical paper in the 15 May 1953 issue of Science, which transformed the concept of scientific ideas concerning the origin of life into a respectable empirical inquiry. His study has become a classic textbook definition of the scientific basis of origin of life, or more specifically, the first definitive experimental evidence of the Oparin and Haldane's "primordial soup" theory. Urey and Miller designed to simulate the ocean-atmospheric condition of the primitive Earth by using a continuous stream of steam into a mixture of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), and hydrogen (H2). The gaseous mixture was then exposed to electrical discharge, which induced chemical reaction. After a week of reaction, Miller detected the formation of amino acids, such as glycine, α- and β-alanine, using paper chromatography. He also detected aspartic acid and gamma-amino butyric acid, but was not confident about them. Since amino acids are the basic structural and functional constituents of cellular life, the experiment showed the possibility of natural organic synthesis for the origin of life on earth.
Publication problem Miller showed his results to Urey, who suggested immediate publication. Urey refused to be the co-author lest Miller receive little or no credit. The manuscript with Miller as the sole author was submitted to the magazine Science on 10 February 1953. After waiting several weeks, Urey inquired and wrote to the chairman of the editorial board on 27 February on the lack of action in reviewing the manuscript. A month passed, but still there was no decision. On 10 March the infuriated Urey demanded the manuscript to be returned, and he himself submitted it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society on 13 March. By then, the editor of Science, apparently annoyed by Urey's insinuation, wrote directly to Miller that the manuscript was to be published. Miller then withdrew the manuscript from the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
