Stanley Miller

His father was an attorney and had the office of the 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.

Stanley Lloyd Miller (March 7, 1930 – May 20, 2007) was an American chemist who made important experiments concerning the origin of life by demonstrating that a wide range of vital organic compounds can be synthesized by fairly simple chemical processes from inorganic substances.

He then had financial problems, as his father died in 1946 leaving the family with a money shortage.

He completed his BSC in June 1951.

With the help from Berkeley faculty (UC Berkeley did not then have assistantships), he was offered a teaching assistantship at the University of Chicago in February 1951, which could 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, meeting various professors, and he preferred theoretical problems as experiments tended to be laborious.

He was initially convinced to work with the theoretical physicist Edward Teller on synthesis of elements.

Conforming to the custom of the university, such that a graduate student is obliged to attend seminars, he attended a chemistry seminar in which the Nobel laureate Harold Urey gave a lecture on the origin of solar system and how organic synthesis could be possible in a reducing environment such as the primitive Earth's atmosphere.

Miller was immensely inspired.

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, and provided evidence for the idea that the chemical evolution of the early Earth had caused the natural synthesis of organic compounds from inanimate inorganic molecules.

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.

After a year of fruitless work with Teller, and the prospect of Teller leaving Chicago to work on the hydrogen bomb, Miller was approached Urey in September 1952 for a fresh research project.

Urey was not immediately enthusiastic on Miller's interest in pre-biotic synthesis, as no successful work had been done, and he even suggested working 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.

He was always afraid that some specks of fly excrement might be the source of the amino acids he discovered in the reaction tube (or was so chided by his classmates).

This was not the case and the result was a demonstration that many "organic" chemical compounds could be produced by purely inorganic processes.

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.

Miller showed his results to Urey, who suggested immediate publication.

Miller eventually earned his doctorate degree in 1954, and a long-lasting reputation.

From spectroscopic observations of stars, it is now well known that complex organic compounds are formed in the gases blown off of carbon rich stars as a result of chemical reactions.

The fundamental issue of what is the association between "pre-biotic organic" compounds and the origin of life has remained.

After completing a doctorate, Miller transferred to the California Institute of Technology as a F. B. Jewett Fellow in 1954 and 1955.

Here 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, Columbia University, New York, 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."