The lies behind the Miller experiment

A University of Arizona chemist and colleagues from Munich, Germany, have discovered how microbes avoid being poisoned by the cyanide and carbon monoxide compounds they make and incorporate into enzymes. The bacteria use the enzymes to turn water into hydrogen for energy.Bacteria with this remarkable ability have long been widely dismissed as one of Mother Nature's interesting, if largely useless and unimportant, oddities, said UA chemistry professor Richard S. Glass.But they now interest industry searching for cheap hydrogen sources for such things as hydrogen-fueled cars and other technologies ...

It is an experiment you could do in a school chemistry lab. But it produces weird growths that, although made purely from inorganic materials, share some of the characteristics of living organisms.Maselko and Strizhak mixed calcium chloride, sodium carbonate, copper chloride, sodium iodide, hydrogen peroxide and starch. They found a fungus-like, soft membrane grows out of the mixture, enclosing a hollow cavity up to 1 cm across. Chemicals diffuse through this membrane, react inside the cavity, and then diffuse out, creating swirling clouds of violet liquid in the green base solution.Rather than reaching equilibrium, this process persists. The reactions, say the researchers, are reminiscent of the way living cells sustain themselves, driven from equilibrium by the flow of chemicals and energy across their membranes.Maselko and Strizhak even saw a kind of replication in their chemical brew. Sometimes the cell structures grew into forms with several lobes, or sprouted buds that split off from the parent membrane.But although they look impressive, can these structures tell us anything about the origin of true life-forms? It seems the answer might be yes, because the differences between the two processes are not as fundamental as one might assume.Maselko is keen to follow up his discovery to see just how far the parallels with life run. "This is only the beginning," he says. "We will see many other systems like this. The next step will be to get these systems to evolve."

... this new work shows that the early chemical steps believed to be important for the origin of life do not necessarily require an already formed planet to occur. Instead, they can readily be taken in the depths of space long before planet formation occurs. This implies that the vastness of space is filled with compounds which, if landing in a hospitable environment, can help jump-start the origin of life."Instead of finding a handful of molecules only slightly more complicated than the starting compounds, hundreds of new compounds are produced in every mixed ice we have studied," space scientist Scott Sandford said. He continued, "We are finding that the types of compounds produced in these ices are strikingly similar to many of those brought to Earth today by infalling meteorites and their smaller cousins, the interplanetary dust particles. ... Thus, much of the organic material found on the Earth in its earliest years probably had an interstellar heritage.""A number of years ago I found that some of the extraterrestrial organic compounds brought to Earth in the Murchison meteorite could form membranous vesicles when they interacted with water," said team member Dave Deamer, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Cruz. ... "When I learned of the ice experiments at NASA Ames, I went to the Astrochemistry Lab intending to find out what would happen when their complex organic mixtures were allowed to interact with water. To our surprise and delight we found that vesicular structures formed that looked very much like those we saw in the Murchison material.""We now know that of the hundreds of new compounds we make in these interstellar ice simulation experiments, many have properties relevant to the origin of life," said biochemist Jason Dworkin. "Upon the addition of liquid water to the organics produced during ice irradiation, some of these new compounds, with no outside help, organize themselves into tiny vesicles with complicated structures. Other new compounds formed are so much more complex than what we started with that they glow when exposed to UV light. Not only that, but these molecules, which can convert energy from the ultraviolet light to the visible range, become part of the self-formed vesicles," continued Dworkin.

It is an experiment you could do in a school chemistry lab. But it produces weird growths that, although made purely from inorganic materials, share some of the characteristics of living organisms.Maselko and Strizhak mixed calcium chloride, sodium carbonate, copper chloride, sodium iodide, hydrogen peroxide and starch. They found a fungus-like, soft membrane grows out of the mixture, enclosing a hollow cavity up to 1 cm across.

"A number of years ago I found that some of the extraterrestrial organic compounds brought to Earth in the Murchison meteorite could form membranous vesicles when they interacted with water," said team member Dave Deamer, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Cruz. ... "When I learned of the ice experiments at NASA Ames, I went to the Astrochemistry Lab intending to find out what would happen when their complex organic mixtures were allowed to interact with water. To our surprise and delight we found that vesicular structures formed that looked very much like those we saw in the Murchison material."

Two of the leading origin-of-life researchers in the 1970's, Klaus Dose and Sidney Fox, said that miller used the wrong gas mixture.