Ingredients for Life ■ 43and replied, “Let me put it this way, Enrico.
If God didn’t do it this way, he overlooked a
good bet!”
Miller and Urey’s experiment, which became
an instant classic in the scientific community,
demonstrated that the basic chemicals for life
could arise under natural conditions. Miller
continued to perform spark discharge experi-
ments, tweaking the experimental conditions
and types of gases in the hope of producing
more amino acids. But for an unknown reason,
perhaps lack of time, Miller never published or
followed up on many of his results—that is, until
the mysterious box sitting on Jeffrey Bada’s shelf
was finally opened.
One Picture,
a Thousand
Experiments
In 2007, Bada was visiting the University of
Te x a s t o g i v e a le c t u r e. H i s t a l k w a s s c he d-
uled immediately after a talk by another close
friend of Miller’s, Antonio Lazcano, a biolo-
gist at the School of Sciences at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico
City. The two men agreed to review each
other’s lecture slides to make sure their talks
didn’t overlap.
One of Lazcano’s slides caught Bada’s eye.
It was a picture of a small glass vial, labeled as
containing a residue from Miller’s early exper-
iments. Bada asked Lazcano about it. Lazcano
explained that during a visit to his friend, Miller
had pulled a cardboard box off a shelf, lifted out
the vial, and let Lazcano take a picture. At the
time, Miller told Lazcano that it was one of the
leftover samples of his spark discharge experi-
ments. Miller had saved them all.
“I was flabbergasted,” says Bada. “I’d known
Stanley since 1965, and he never once mentioned
it.” It dawned on Bada that the box might still
exist. He called his lab and asked if anyone had
seen the box that Cleaves had given him four
years earlier. As soon as Bada returned to the
lab, he found and opened the box. It was like a
scientist’s Christmas; the box was full of care-
fully labeled plastic boxes containing thin glass
vials, many with films of dried brown, tar-like
gunk in the bottom. “It was on the order of
200–300 vials,” says Bada (Figure 3.3). “It
was extracts from experiments throughout the
course of his life.”
Luckily, Miller kept notebooks detailing the
specific contents of each vial. He had performed
two other experiments shortly after his original
spark discharge work, using variations on the
original apparatus. In one, a different method
generated the spark. In another, which caught
Bada’s attention, hot steam was injected directly
into the spark chamber.Figure 3.3
Electric discharge samples from Miller’s experiments
HENDERSON (JIM) CLEAVES
Jim Cleaves is an organic geochemist at the
Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington,
DC. As a graduate student of Stanley Miller in
2003, he discovered old vials from Miller’s
1950s experiments. Today, Cleaves continues
to study how life arose on Earth.