Stanley Miller's 1958 Experimental Samples (IMAGE)

Georgia Institute of Technology

Stanley Miller's 1958 Experimental Samples

Caption

Vials contain samples of prebiotic materials created by Stanley Miller in 1958, labeled by Miller himself. Miller added a potential prebiotic condensation agent, cyanamide, during the course of the experiment. Cyanamide has been suggested to induce polymerization of amino acid into simple peptides which is an important set in chemical evolution and possibly the origin of life. For unknown reasons, Miller had never analyzed the samples. In a paper published in 2014, researchers at Georgia Tech and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego analyzed the samples and established the potential importance of reagents - substances that cause chemical reactions such as cyanamide -- in the origin of life on Earth.

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Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

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