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Article: Primordial soup returns to life: vials from '50s hold hints of volcanic birth for amino acids.(Life)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- November 8, 2008
- Author:
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After decades of languishing in a cardboard box, unanalyzed vials from a famous chemistry experiment have been brought back to the lab, revealing new clues to the beginnings of life on Earth.
Over 50 years ago, 23-year-old graduate student Stanley Miller conducted an experiment with his adviser, Nobel laureate Harold Urey. They showed that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could be made from a cocktail of basic chemical precursors, the "primordial soup."
Now a team led by Miller's former graduate student Jeffrey Bada reports that remnants from a variation of that experiment, designed to simulate a volcanic environment, contain even more ...