Stanley L. Miller, an emeritus professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego whose famous laboratory experiments in 1952 demonstrated how the simple organic compounds considered necessary for the origin of life could have been synthesized on the primitive Earth, died yesterday. He was 77. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.nl.html?pid=22696 As Miller himself noted in relatively recent times*, while his initial work provided what seemed a promising lead to how life could have originated, progressing beyond that point proved "much more difficult than they had expected". I'll hazard the almost certain to be challenged assertion that, despite our vast increases in knowledge about life since 1952, the current state of the art in 'producing life' is essentially hardly further ahead of where it was in the decade after Miller's discovery. Russell * Essentially verbatim in intention but not in words. _______________________________________________________________ Father of 'Origin of Life' Chemistry at UC San Diego Dies Date Released: Thursday, May 24, 2007 Source: University of California San Diego Stanley L. Miller, an emeritus professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego whose famous laboratory experiments in 1952 demonstrated how the simple organic compounds considered necessary for the origin of life could have been synthesized on the primitive Earth, died yesterday. He was 77. One of the founding chemists of UCSD, Miller was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, working under the late Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate who later moved to La Jolla and founded UCSD's chemistry department. On May 15, 1953, Miller published a paper in the journal Science detailing a novel experiment that produced the building blocks of life from nothing more than hydrogen, water, methane and ammonia. No one then knew how the organic compounds found in life could have originated on the barren, primitive Earth, which Urey surmised had coalesced from a cloud of dust and was initially surrounded by an atmosphere of hydrogen, water, ammonia and methane - some of the major components of the universe. So Miller put water and ammonia into a globe-shaped flask with hydrogen and methane gas, boiled the solution and zapped the contents with an electrical discharge to simulate lightning and coronal discharges in the atmosphere. Within a week, he had produced a "molecular soup" containing amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and of life itself. "The public's imagination was captivated by the outcome of the experiment," said Jeffrey L. Bada, a professor of marine chemistry at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was one of Miller's graduate students at UCSD and a leading expert on the chemical origin of life. "By the time the results were corroborated by an independent group three years later, the metaphor of the 'prebiotic soup' had found its way into comic strips, cartoons, movies and novels." Miller, the first assistant professor of chemistry recruited to work at UCSD, continued his research into the chemical origins of life for over four decades in La Jolla and helped to establish the university's strong tradition of interdisciplinary research. "Like Roger Revelle, who built UCSD from the 'top down' with the best and the brightest, Miller and Urey were bold thinkers with a broad knowledge of science and gifted scientific intuitions who opened new disciplines in their quest to understand our origins," said Mark Thiemens, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UCSD. "Stanley Miller was the father of origin of life chemistry," said Bada. "And he was a leader in that field for many decades, remaining active even after his first stroke in November, 1999. It was the Miller experiment that almost overnight transformed the study of the origin of life into a respectable field of inquiry." He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1951 and his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1954. He spent a year at Caltech on a fellowship, then five more years at Columbia University before joining the faculty of the newly formed San Diego campus of the University of California. Most of his research had been focused on the origin of life, especially the prebiotic synthesis of small molecules. In addition, he was a pioneer in the investigation of the natural occurrence of clathrate hydrates, the mechanism of the action of general anesthetics and the thermodynamics of bioorganic compounds. Miller was a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He received the Oparin Medal from the International Society of the Study of the Origin of Life in 1983 and was president of the society from 1986 to 1989. He was also an Honorary Counselor of the Higher Council for Scientific Research of Spain in 1973. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist