THE MILLER-UREY — a dart

THE MILLER-UREY a spark makes the stuff of life

In 1953 a graduate student sealed methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water in glass, ran a spark through it for a week — a lightning storm in a bottle — and found the flask had made amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Life’s ingredients, it turned out, assemble from simple gases and energy. The spark only rearranges bonds; every atom is conserved. The experiment that made the origin of life a laboratory question.

THE TECHNIQUE gases + energy → amino acids (atoms conserved)

The demo builds glycine (the simplest amino acid) and checks the spark conserves every atom: live demo

HISTORY & CREDIT Miller & Urey · 1953

“Miller-Urey created life.” — it created amino acids, not life; and later work found its 1953 vials held even more compounds than reported. cited

the bottle · CH₄, NH₃, H₂O, H₂ — a reducing primordial sky.
the spark · energy rearranges bonds; atoms are conserved — out come amino acids.
1953 · Stanley Miller, grad student of Harold Urey, at Chicago.

Life’s bricks, from gas and lightning. origin of life

RECOMMEND FOR I-13 conservation, on the compiler

On i-13, glycine (C₂H₅NO₂) is 10 atoms, and the synthesis conserves every element:

$ i13 run lf_miller-urey.i13 RUN OK · 52 step(s) glycine_atoms = 10 -- C2 H5 N O2 atoms_conserved = 1 amino_acids_formed = 1

Recommend as a NULL — conservation (B39). A reaction conserves atoms by definition; the synthesis is a pinned mass balance. NULL — a spark makes the stuff of life.