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Stanley Miller

1930–2007 · 77 years

The graduate student who talked his adviser into the origin of life

Portrait of Stanley Miller — Unknown author — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Oakland High School knew him as a chem whiz. His father, a lawyer, died in 1946, leaving the family short of money. Stanley Miller followed his brother to Berkeley — partly because Donald could help with the chemistry — and finished his degree in 1951. A teaching assistantship carried him to the University of Chicago that September. A year on stellar nucleosynthesis with Edward Teller produced no thesis. Then he sat through a seminar in which Harold Urey speculated that the early Earth's atmosphere might have manufactured organic compounds by itself. Miller asked to test it. Urey steered him toward a safer problem and warned that the idea could easily yield nothing in the years a doctorate allowed. Miller kept asking. He was 22 when Urey gave in.

The apparatus was sealed glass. Water in the lower flask boiled into vapor. The upper flask held methane, ammonia and hydrogen, standing in for the young Earth's air, and electrodes fired sparks through it in place of lightning. Within days the water had darkened and gone murky. After a week Miller ran a sample through paper chromatography and found amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — out of nothing but simple gases and energy. Science published it on May 15, 1953, under his name alone. Urey had taken his own off so the credit would be unambiguous.

The strongest objection is to the premise. Geochemists now think the early atmosphere was much less reducing than the mixture Miller sparked — closer to carbon dioxide and nitrogen, which produce organic compounds far less readily. If the starting gases were wrong, the inference from flask to planet is weak. Nor did the experiment make life. It made some of life's parts, a much smaller claim, and the gap between amino acids and a self-copying cell remains the problem. Hydrothermal vents, delivery by comets and meteorites, and an RNA world preceding proteins now compete with the spark-discharge picture. One thing went the other way. Vials of residue from runs he never analyzed sat in his laboratory for decades. His former students re-examined them after his death and found 22 amino acids, far more than he could detect in 1953.

He went to UC San Diego in 1960 as the chemistry department's first assistant professor and stayed for the rest of his working life. He published on clathrate hydrates and anesthesia, but he ran variations on the 1953 experiment for more than 50 years and never left the question behind. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973 and nominated for a Nobel more than once without winning. A stroke in November 1999 began a series of them. He died on May 20, 2007, in a hospital near the National City nursing home where he had been living. The apparatus is in every biology textbook. The question it was built to answer is still open.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Stanley Miller's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

The Miller-Urey spark-discharge experiment discovery
Amino acids from methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water and electric sparks 1952
Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions article
Science, May 15, 1953 — Miller as sole author, at Urey's insistence 1953
Prebiotic Synthesis of Hydrophobic and Protein Amino Acids article
The 1953 run repeated with modern analyzers, yielding 33 amino acids 1972
Nonprotein Amino Acids from Spark Discharges article
Set against the amino acids found in the Murchison meteorite 1972
A Reassessment of Prebiotic Organic Synthesis in Neutral Planetary Atmospheres article
Published after his death — the experiment redone with a less reducing mixture 2008

Life in brief

with age at each point

March 7, 1930 aged 0 Born in Oakland, California Second son of Nathan and Edith Miller, a lawyer and a schoolteacher.
June 1951 aged 21 Finishes a chemistry degree at Berkeley He had followed his older brother Donald there.
1951 aged ~21 Hears Harold Urey argue that the early Earth could make organic compounds Miller had enrolled at the University of Chicago that September and was working with Edward Teller.
September 1952 aged 22 Urey relents and lets him build the apparatus Urey had pushed him toward thallium in meteorites instead.
May 15, 1953 aged 23 Science publishes the result under his name alone Urey refused co-authorship so that the credit could not be misread.
1954 aged ~24 Earns his doctorate at Chicago and takes a fellowship at Caltech
1960 aged ~30 Joins the new University of California, San Diego First assistant professor in its chemistry department. He stayed for the rest of his career.
November 1999 aged 69 The first of a series of strokes
May 20, 2007 aged 77 Dies at a hospital in National City, California Boxes of unanalyzed vials from the 1950s runs were found in his laboratory and re-examined the following year.