Stanley Miller, the UC San Diego chemist who was the first to demonstrate that the organic molecules necessary for life could be generated in a laboratory flask simulating the primitive Earth's atmosphere, died Sunday from heart failure in a hospital in National City. He was 77.
..."Stanley Miller was the father of origin-of-life chemistry," said marine chemist Jeffrey L. Bada of UC San Diego, a former graduate student of Miller's. "And he was the leader in that field for many decades.... It was the Miller experiment that almost overnight transformed the study of the origin of life into a respectable field of inquiry." When Miller began his work as a graduate student in late 1952, scientists had already been speculating for decades about how life could have arisen on the planet, but practical experiments had been few and unsuccessful. He drew on the work of University of Chicago chemist Harold C. Urey, who had suggested in 1951 that the early Earth's atmosphere contained methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water - and no oxygen. To read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-me-miller24may24,1,691092.story Or: http://tinyurl.com/2qngzd -- Ronn! :) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
