15 ms·

Scientists recreated classic origin-of-life experiment and made a new discovery

409 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

xor99 5y ago
This reminds me of the chemist who's beard was so long and dirty it led to his experiments crystallising with high frequency due to the amount of matter falling off the hairs into solution.
briffid 5y ago
And it is also especially helpful if intelligent beings drive the whole process :)
thriftwy 5y ago
Then there is a mystory of how environment with high availability of phosphates, which are responsible for energy transfer in all life cells cells, came to be: https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html
- adrian_b 5y ago
  While there is much that is unknown yet, there is much less mystery about phosphates than many people think. In the modern oceans, there is a very high abundance of calcium and magnesium ions. This keeps the phosphate concentration in the water low, because when there is much phosphate, it precipitates with the calcium ions, making apatite rocks. However the oceans at the time when life appeared had a composition different than today. The oceans have formed by the condensation of the volcanic gases, which are made of water and of acidic substances (mainly oxides of carbon and sulfur and hydracids of halogens and sulfur). So the initial oceans were very acid. After formation they began to dissolve the more easily soluble rocks, e.g. carbonates and phosphates and then also the easier soluble of the silicates, starting with the alkaline silicates. So the concentration of phosphate in the initial oceans was much higher than today, due to the very low pH of the water and due to the lack of calcium and magnesium ions in appreciable quantities. In time the pH of the oceans increased tending towards the neutral value (today the oceans are slightly alkaline, but that changes with the increase of carbon dioxide in atmosphere, which makes them more and more acid), while the concentration of sodium and potassium increased, neutralizing a part of the acids. Because the rocks with calcium and magnesium dissolve much slower than those with sodium and potassium, the concentration of calcium and magnesium in the sea water remained low for a longer time and it probably reached the current levels much later, after the apparition of life. Only then the concentration of phosphate diminished to the current values. So a much higher initial availability of phosphate in solution, in the sea water, is expected, it is not mysterious.
interestica 5y ago
> Most ancient recipes call for whole small fatty fish to be layered between herbs and salt in concrete vats. Palacios’ team used large glass fermenting vessels. There's a future where the art of charred oak barrel bourbon is lost and scientists try to recreate it in glass vessels....
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  Somewhat related to this article, though it seems you're commenting on something else: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/recoving-the-recipe-for-garum-180978846/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/recoving-the-rec...
- gradschoolfail 5y ago
  Except, great irony, in TFA, it was the glass vessels and not the other ones which had bits of the walls going into solution and helping to make the other amino acids. Eventually perhaps giving rise to oak trees. Doesnt look like it to a lowly primate, but glass has a hallowed place in the cosmos, cherry oak is a fucking upstart
- kevinmchugh 5y ago
  I think you ended up on the wrong thread
  - interestica 5y ago
    Yeah what. How did that happen. There's no redemption here or some tangential way I can relate this....
    - jrootabega 5y ago
      There's probably some cosmic horror that just seeds barren planets with life to give them a nice umami flavor. Life is just Cthulhu's fish sauce.
evancoop 5y ago
How many fascinating analogs exist for this problem? "...the corrosion on the glass also forms millions of tiny pits. The authors think those pits could serve as tiny reaction chambers..." In other words, the experimental conditions, as intended, were almost "too perfect." The simulation of reality requires some amount of unspecified noise with respect to CONDITIONS, in this case, corroded glass. How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions?
- thereisnospork 5y ago
  > How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions? All of them, approximately. There are a few journals like http://www.orgsyn.org/ http://www.orgsyn.org/ that consist entirely of rigorously vetted methods, but that is definitely an outlier. The significance of the noise will depend on the specifics, of course. I'm fairly sure there have been a few high profile retractions of 'metal-free catalysis' that were ultimately traced to metal impurities in the reagents. There was also an incident with the DOE where in the process of refurbishing some of the nuclear arsenal they found that they couldn't reproduce one of the necessary ingredients due to some then unknown change. I am blanking on the (code)name of the material they were trying to reproduce though.
  - icegreentea2 5y ago
    You're thinking of FOGBANK. Apparently they needed some of the impurities present in the original manufacturing runs to get the properties they wanted. Restarting FOGBANK production was problematic because a) the manufacturing process is in itself tricky and nasty and then b) once they restarted it they discovered the previously overlooked impurities. Apparently they've resolved that.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I'm not aware of any bench experiment that eliminates all noise (I think that would be physically impossible) but we can certainly isolate things from the external environment very well, and the physical results you get from those tend to be very "clean" (IE, if you're measuring a physical parameter which is required to be an integer, and computing a mean on your observed values, the mean will be near the integer and the variance will be tiny compared to the magnitude of the integer. On the computer, many "experiments" (really simulations) are 100% deterministic and therefore have perfectly predictable noise characteristics. Most simulations are not deterministic for a wide range of engineering reasons (order of summation in a distributed environment, inability to specify random seed) but are nondeterministic in a statistically useful way (IE, you can run a few times and get a good idea of the real result).
PGenes 5y ago
Not an expert but wondering why Methane was used as a precursor for the experiment since its an organic compound. Was the idea not to produce organic compunds from purely inorganic ones?
ldehaan 5y ago
This makes me think, maybe the most important thing in the universe is silicon, and also, we're silicon life, computers Are our babies. I am yo neighbor.
qvrjuec 5y ago
The Miller-Urey experiment isn't relevant to me after learning more about the hydrothermal vent theory for abiogenesis. "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane is a great read for anyone interested in the topic
zackmorris 5y ago
Carl Sagan made amino acids with a similar experiment, I remember my dad telling me about it back in the 80s. It looks like he joined the scene a little later though, and that Urey (who only won a Nobel prize for discovering deuterium) was his mentor: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/miller_urey_experiment.html http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/miller_urey_experiment... https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/carl-sagan-and-the-tradition-of-science/sagans-science-mentors https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cos... https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/scientists-finish-a-53-year-old-classic-experiment-on-the-origins-of-life https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/scientists-fin...
gaoshan 5y ago
So does this mean that any planet with a reduced atmosphere, electrical storms, silicate-rich rocky surfaces, and liquid water would have a good chance of developing life, at some point?
- dekhn 5y ago
  you can't conclude anything from these experiments like that. we can conclude that many planets are likely to have rich organic soups, but nobody has made plausible link from organic soups to true living information processing systems.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    > nobody has made plausible link from organic soups to true living information processing systems Even "true living information processing systems", whatever those are supposed to be, are only made up of the same basic parts as said organic soup.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      yes, but apparently through some irreducible complexity (arguable), and most of the original history of we got from "a soup" to "life" has been erased.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Reminds me how they eye was seen as counter argument against evolution because its complexity couldn't have developed naturally. But today we pretty much know how it evolved from a photosensitive spot to the complex mechanism we see (huh!) today.
ibraaaaa 5y ago
https://youtube.com/c/DrJamesTour https://youtube.com/c/DrJamesTour
- gliptic 5y ago
  https://youtu.be/ghJGnMwRHCs https://youtu.be/ghJGnMwRHCs
dekken_ 5y ago
Organic/non-organic distinction is arbitrary. Life is just complexity manifest.
- nathias 5y ago
  so is bad code, the distinction is about emergent properties
- FabHK 5y ago
  To be fair, it was not just "organic", but quite specific organic, namely proteinogenic amino acids that make up proteins.
- Socketier 5y ago
  That's a really profound sounding way of saying that life is complex and we don't understand it. Or are you saying that we do understand it? If so I'm sure you're in high demand right now.
- sdhfjg 5y ago
  Are you ok?
- desertraven 5y ago
  This is succinct and quite eye-opening for me. Would you be willing to elaborate in any direction you please?
  - 74B5 5y ago
    Since the beginning of time, things merge. Subatomic "particles" into atoms into molecules into bigger molecules, all directed by physics. Biochemistry, is just chemistry, is just physics.
    - zKqGcn 5y ago
      And physics is just applied mathematics! It's applied complexity all the way down.
    - 5y ago
gibolt 5y ago
Taken from the Ars comments: Article Quote: When Miller showed his results to Urey, the latter suggested a paper should be published as soon as possible. (Urey was senior but generously declined to be listed as co-author, lest this lead to Miller getting little to no credit for the work.) As if Urey doesn't deserve enough respect, the story is better than described: Sub-article Quote: After Miller showed the impressive results to Urey, they decided to submit them to Science. Urey declined Miller’s offer to coauthor the report because otherwise Miller would receive little or no credit. Knowing that a graduate student could have a difficult time getting a paper like this published, Urey contacted the Science editorial office to explain the importance of the work and ask that the paper be published as soon as possible. Urey kept mentioning the results in his lectures, drawing considerable attention from the news media. The manuscript was sent to Science in early February of 1953. Several weeks went by with no news. Growing impatient, Urey wrote to Howard Meyerhoff, chairman of AAAS’s Editorial Board, on 27 February to complain about the lack of progress. Then, on 8 March 1953, the New York Times reported in a short article entitled, “Looking Back Two Billion Years” that W. M. MacNevin and his associates at Ohio State University had performed several experiments simulating the primitive Earth—including a discharge experiment with methane wherein “resinous solids too complex for analysis” were produced. The next day, Miller sent Urey a copy of the clipping with a note saying “I am not sure what should be done now, since their work is, in essence, my thesis. As of today, I have not received the proof from Science, and in the letter that was sent to you, Meyerhoff said that he had sent my note for review.” Infuriated by this news, Urey had Miller withdraw the paper and submit it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Ironically, at the same time (11 March), Meyerhoff, evidently frustrated by Urey’s actions, wrote to Miller that he wanted to publish the manuscript as a lead article and that he wanted Miller—not Urey—to make the final decision about the manuscript. Miller immediately accepted Meyerhoff’s offer, the paper was withdrawn from the Journal of the American Chemical Society and returned to Science, and was published on 15 May 1953. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Prebiotic-Soup--Revisiting-the-Miller-Experiment-Bada-Lazcano/2bc88c90298a5a0ce1cbfc7bcabbfa22e9e21cad https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Prebiotic-Soup--Revisi...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dandotway 5y ago
TL;DR summary: The actual glass the lab flasks were made of mattered. Miller's lab flasks were made of borosilicate glass and this caused more organic compounds to form than a more truly inert Teflon flask. But Earth's crust is over 90% silicates which could have similarly contributed to the formation of organic compounds in ancient pre-life earth.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  It’s weird how this was the headline of the article but it’s only mentioned very briefly right at the end of the article with very little explanation.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    It’s so that you get to read the whole thing. Granted, it’s written well, so the time reading it has been spent well.
- mod 5y ago
  I thought the more important fact was that the original experiment produced a bigger variety of aminos than previously thought, discovered by re-examining the original material with modern tech.
AltruisticGapHN 5y ago
"Wherever there are rocks... watch out!" - Alan Watts (context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEE561GhO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEE561GhO8 )
wombatmobile 5y ago
> In addition, they found that the corrosion on the glass also forms millions of tiny pits. The authors think those pits could serve as tiny reaction chambers, also speeding up the rate at which organic molecules form in the experiment. Interesting. Photo please, anyone?
noduerme 5y ago
So the new experiment has three flasks. One is borosilicate, the other two are teflon. One of the teflon flasks has pieces of borosilicate floating in it. Both the teflon flasks failed to reproduce the results of the original experiment. Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon?
- anshumankmr 5y ago
  >Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon? Shocking
- high_byte 5y ago
  I might have missed something. says the teflon flasks produced less organic material, but I assumed it was only the teflon without borosilicate? my understanding was that borosilicate contributed to creation of organic materials.
  - mrob 5y ago
    "The results: far fewer organic compounds formed in the experiments using just the Teflon flasks." Not the clearest way to phrase it, but I agree it most likely means the loose borosilicate bits worked too.
    - high_byte 5y ago
      that's what I thought. I think they meant "flask", or several "plain teflon flasks" were involved.
- nobrains 5y ago
  The takeaway is that the silica / silicate in the glass acted as the silica in the rocks and gave a more closer to real-life scenario, so it solidifies the original experiment even more, while noting that the original authors did not intend this.
  - noduerme 5y ago
StuntPope 5y ago
Only problem is that the Miller Urey experiment never told us anything about the origin of life. Inorganic to organic compounds, sure. But nobody has ever been able to get from there to cells and DNA.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Indeed. There is just enormous amounts of shoddy thinking out there from people on the subject of Origin of Life. I'm particularly annoyed by the non sequitur "the universe is large, so there must (with high probability) be life elsewhere." (If anyone reading this thinks that's a valid argument, go look in a mirror and slap yourself.)
  - whaaswijk 5y ago
    Would you like to say a bit more about why that's not a valid argument. To be clear, I'm not saying it is (I don't know enough about the subject to do so) but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. Isn't similar probabilistic reasoning used to explain why evolution by natural selection gives rise to various complex life forms? If so, do you also think that that reasoning is shoddy?
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Let N be the number of places life could arise, and p the probability that life arises in one of those places. That argument is basically "there is a value of N such that for any p > 0, N p is much greater than 1." But that's obviously wrong. For any N, there are values of p > 0 that make the product N p arbitrarily close to 0. The dim intution behind the argument was that p can't be "too small". But given our current understanding of OoL, that's not a justified assumption. p could be exponentially small, if OoL requires some extremely unlikely step. Natural selection is great once the system's reproductive fidelity is good enough to support it. The problem is bridging the gap from small molecules to that system. The smallest system we know of that can independently support Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms.
      - 5y ago
xbmcuser 5y ago
So the ancient belief of 3 elements that led to existence of life is correct. soil, water, fire/lightning,
bborud 5y ago
In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there's a slight pause/discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what. As you move along this axis stuff feels more and more complex, messy and hard to nail down definitively. More practical. More prone to get tripped up by silly mistakes and things you never imagined you had to think about. The new compounds they discovered in the old samples kind of illustrates how much hard work is required to get good answers. You can't just suck on your pipe, scratch your quill on some parchment and exert yourself mentally, you have to scrape gunk out of test-tubes and be really careful and thorough in a highly practical sense. The world is imprecise and gnarly and you kind of have to hope for the best. I really admire people who are capable of wringing results out of goo and specks of dust using gadgets that require calibration that has to be able to distinguish actual good signal from residues of the danish you had for breakfast. (Example not entirely random since one of our engineers eating a danish for lunch in his office made the electrochemical sensors he was working on go absolutely apeshit. Kind of good to know before you evacuate a whole industrial site and send in the people in yellow hazmat suits)
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  > In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there's a slight pause/discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what. Man there really is an XKCD for everything: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    "Now one speculative [i.e., theoretical] science is said to be nobler than another, either by reason of its greater certitude, or by reason of the higher worth of its subject-matter...Of the practical sciences, that one is nobler which is ordained to a further purpose, as political science is nobler than military science; for the good of the army is directed to the good of the State." Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 5., a. 1
- 5y ago
DonHopkins 5y ago
Julia Child had a great recipe for Primordial Soup! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973): https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video-the-primordial-soup-with-julia-child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video... Also a great recipe for shark repellent, that she made for the CIA. https://web.archive.org/web/20180408020021/https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2015-featured-story-archive/shark-repellent.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180408020021/https://www.cia.g... >Julia Child and the OSS Recipe for Shark Repellent >“The answer to the threat of man-eating sharks, the scavengers which infest all tropical waters of the world, was announced here today…” (quote from draft OSS/ERE Press Release on the development of a shark repellent; April 13, 1943) And she showed how to bone a chicken on Saturday Night Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ Previous HN discussion: Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973) [video] (instructure.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467695 Video: The Primordial Soup with Julia Child. (Click on the small thumbnail in the second row with the (>) "play" icon to see the video.) https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video-the-primordial-soup-with-julia-child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video... The National Air and Space Museum used to show this delightful video in its "Life in The Universe" exhibit, in which Julia Child recreates Stanley Miller's famous experiment, cooking up a delicious hot batch of Primordial Soup! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/julia-child-and-the-primordial-soup-35465592/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/julia-child-an... >Julia Child and the Primordial Soup >Scientists don't yet know how life began here on Earth. Mineralogist Bob Hazen, who is profiled in the October issue of Smithsonian, thinks that rocks were key to the development of life. Reporter Helen Fields wrote: >It’s the complexity of the hydrothermal vent environment—gushing hot water mixing with cold water near rocks, and ore deposits providing hard surfaces where newly formed amino acids could congregate—that makes it such a good candidate as a cradle of life. “Organic chemists have long used test tubes,” he says, “but the origin of life uses rocks, it uses water, it uses atmosphere. Once life gets a foothold, the fact that the environment is so variable is what drives evolution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment >The Miller–Urey experiment (or Miller experiment) was a chemical experiment that simulated the conditions thought at the time (1952) to be present on the early Earth and tested the chemical origin of life under those conditions. The experiment at the time supported Alexander Oparin's and J. B. S. Haldane's hypothesis that putative conditions on the primitive Earth favoured chemical reactions that synthesized more complex organic compounds from simpler inorganic precursors. Considered to be the classic experiment investigating abiogenesis, it was conducted in 1952 by Stanley Miller, with assistance from Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago and later the University of California, San Diego and published the following year. https://www.wired.com/2009/05/dayintech-0515 https://www.wired.com/2009/05/dayintech-0515 >May 15, 1953: Cookin' Up Some Primordial Soup >1953: Stanley Miller, just 23 years old, publishes his landmark work on the production of amino acids, a necessary component of life, in a jar.
rdevsrex 5y ago
It's kind of ironic that both in cosmology and biology we know an incredible amount, but yet we still don't how the universe or life on earth began. Sure, we have educated guesses, but until we can unify QM and GR or produce a cell from simple elements, they remain guesses.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  That's how lots of science works. Especially science involving the past, or science very far away. Even if we do create a "cell" (whatever that means), it will only give us a possible explanation of how it happened on Earth. It will shrink the possible probabilities of all other methods, such as Aliens engineering us, but we cannot reduce all probabilities to zero... without a time machine. Unfortunately we live in a world where even 100% definite in-your-face proof will not convince a frighteningly large %age of humanity. IMHO claiming everything is "still a guess" shows a lack of understanding of science. I'm not judging, because I can't tell what you do and don't know from just three sentences. But it kinda sounds like it.
- api 5y ago
  There are numerous possibilities for how life began, and whatever process was involved probably took a minimum of millions of years to lead to something self-replicating and stable enough to start adapting. This makes abiogenesis theories likely impossible to directly test over human time scales. Not that we shouldn't try... it's possible that certain conditions can give rise to self-replicating molecular systems that can adapt very quickly. This doesn't prove that these conditions were the exact ones responsible on primordial Earth, but it does prove that the phenomenon of abiogenesis is categorically possible under plausible early Earth conditions. There are lots of other phenomena in nature that may be impossible to directly test. Biological evolution for instance is somewhat testable, but only on a small scale in both time and organismal complexity: http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/ http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/ We can also run computer evolution experiments that validate some of the theoretical assumptions underlying biological evolution in a very abstract way, but these can't validate specific biological hypotheses about physical systems.
eyear 5y ago
Facebook should put more money into this kind of research instead of hiring PR company to change its name.
mrfusion 5y ago
I think the simplest life is at least few orders of magnitude more complex than creating amino acids though. I feel people gloss over this fact.
- reubenswartz 5y ago
  I don't know if people gloss over it, or it's just a good place to start. It's like if you were wondering how a giant Lego set came to be, you might start with the pieces.
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    I think an analogy would be we created some of the lego blocks in this experiment but a single cell would be akin to all the lego creations in the world.
dekhn 5y ago
the original article was used in my graduate program as a list of all the things biologists shouldn't do when working on origin of life. Like, "they got the basic details of the atmosphere wrong". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Evolution_of_Earth's_atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Evolution_...

409 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

This reminds me of the chemist who's beard was so long and dirty it led to his experiments crystallising with high frequency due to the amount of matter falling off the hairs into solution.

briffid 5y ago

And it is also especially helpful if intelligent beings drive the whole process :)

thriftwy 5y ago

Then there is a mystory of how environment with high availability of phosphates, which are responsible for energy transfer in all life cells cells, came to be: https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html

adrian_b 5y ago
While there is much that is unknown yet, there is much less mystery about phosphates than many people think. In the modern oceans, there is a very high abundance of calcium and magnesium ions. This keeps the phosphate concentration in the water low, because when there is much phosphate, it precipitates with the calcium ions, making apatite rocks. However the oceans at the time when life appeared had a composition different than today. The oceans have formed by the condensation of the volcanic gases, which are made of water and of acidic substances (mainly oxides of carbon and sulfur and hydracids of halogens and sulfur). So the initial oceans were very acid. After formation they began to dissolve the more easily soluble rocks, e.g. carbonates and phosphates and then also the easier soluble of the silicates, starting with the alkaline silicates. So the concentration of phosphate in the initial oceans was much higher than today, due to the very low pH of the water and due to the lack of calcium and magnesium ions in appreciable quantities. In time the pH of the oceans increased tending towards the neutral value (today the oceans are slightly alkaline, but that changes with the increase of carbon dioxide in atmosphere, which makes them more and more acid), while the concentration of sodium and potassium increased, neutralizing a part of the acids. Because the rocks with calcium and magnesium dissolve much slower than those with sodium and potassium, the concentration of calcium and magnesium in the sea water remained low for a longer time and it probably reached the current levels much later, after the apparition of life. Only then the concentration of phosphate diminished to the current values. So a much higher initial availability of phosphate in solution, in the sea water, is expected, it is not mysterious.

interestica 5y ago

> Most ancient recipes call for whole small fatty fish to be layered between herbs and salt in concrete vats. Palacios’ team used large glass fermenting vessels. There's a future where the art of charred oak barrel bourbon is lost and scientists try to recreate it in glass vessels....

slowmovintarget 5y ago
Somewhat related to this article, though it seems you're commenting on something else: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/recoving-the-recipe-for-garum-180978846/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/recoving-the-rec...
gradschoolfail 5y ago
Except, great irony, in TFA, it was the glass vessels and not the other ones which had bits of the walls going into solution and helping to make the other amino acids. Eventually perhaps giving rise to oak trees. Doesnt look like it to a lowly primate, but glass has a hallowed place in the cosmos, cherry oak is a fucking upstart
kevinmchugh 5y ago
I think you ended up on the wrong thread
- interestica 5y ago
  Yeah what. How did that happen. There's no redemption here or some tangential way I can relate this....
  - jrootabega 5y ago
    There's probably some cosmic horror that just seeds barren planets with life to give them a nice umami flavor. Life is just Cthulhu's fish sauce.

evancoop 5y ago

How many fascinating analogs exist for this problem? "...the corrosion on the glass also forms millions of tiny pits. The authors think those pits could serve as tiny reaction chambers..." In other words, the experimental conditions, as intended, were almost "too perfect." The simulation of reality requires some amount of unspecified noise with respect to CONDITIONS, in this case, corroded glass. How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions?

thereisnospork 5y ago
> How many experiments, on the terminal or the bench, are run with noise in the underlying test conditions? All of them, approximately. There are a few journals like http://www.orgsyn.org/ http://www.orgsyn.org/ that consist entirely of rigorously vetted methods, but that is definitely an outlier. The significance of the noise will depend on the specifics, of course. I'm fairly sure there have been a few high profile retractions of 'metal-free catalysis' that were ultimately traced to metal impurities in the reagents. There was also an incident with the DOE where in the process of refurbishing some of the nuclear arsenal they found that they couldn't reproduce one of the necessary ingredients due to some then unknown change. I am blanking on the (code)name of the material they were trying to reproduce though.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  You're thinking of FOGBANK. Apparently they needed some of the impurities present in the original manufacturing runs to get the properties they wanted. Restarting FOGBANK production was problematic because a) the manufacturing process is in itself tricky and nasty and then b) once they restarted it they discovered the previously overlooked impurities. Apparently they've resolved that.
dekhn 5y ago
I'm not aware of any bench experiment that eliminates all noise (I think that would be physically impossible) but we can certainly isolate things from the external environment very well, and the physical results you get from those tend to be very "clean" (IE, if you're measuring a physical parameter which is required to be an integer, and computing a mean on your observed values, the mean will be near the integer and the variance will be tiny compared to the magnitude of the integer. On the computer, many "experiments" (really simulations) are 100% deterministic and therefore have perfectly predictable noise characteristics. Most simulations are not deterministic for a wide range of engineering reasons (order of summation in a distributed environment, inability to specify random seed) but are nondeterministic in a statistically useful way (IE, you can run a few times and get a good idea of the real result).

PGenes 5y ago

Not an expert but wondering why Methane was used as a precursor for the experiment since its an organic compound. Was the idea not to produce organic compunds from purely inorganic ones?

ldehaan 5y ago

This makes me think, maybe the most important thing in the universe is silicon, and also, we're silicon life, computers Are our babies. I am yo neighbor.

qvrjuec 5y ago

The Miller-Urey experiment isn't relevant to me after learning more about the hydrothermal vent theory for abiogenesis. "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane is a great read for anyone interested in the topic

zackmorris 5y ago

Carl Sagan made amino acids with a similar experiment, I remember my dad telling me about it back in the 80s. It looks like he joined the scene a little later though, and that Urey (who only won a Nobel prize for discovering deuterium) was his mentor: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/miller_urey_experiment.html http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/miller_urey_experiment... https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/carl-sagan-and-the-tradition-of-science/sagans-science-mentors https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cos... https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/scientists-finish-a-53-year-old-classic-experiment-on-the-origins-of-life https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/scientists-fin...

gaoshan 5y ago

So does this mean that any planet with a reduced atmosphere, electrical storms, silicate-rich rocky surfaces, and liquid water would have a good chance of developing life, at some point?

dekhn 5y ago
you can't conclude anything from these experiments like that. we can conclude that many planets are likely to have rich organic soups, but nobody has made plausible link from organic soups to true living information processing systems.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > nobody has made plausible link from organic soups to true living information processing systems Even "true living information processing systems", whatever those are supposed to be, are only made up of the same basic parts as said organic soup.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    yes, but apparently through some irreducible complexity (arguable), and most of the original history of we got from "a soup" to "life" has been erased.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Reminds me how they eye was seen as counter argument against evolution because its complexity couldn't have developed naturally. But today we pretty much know how it evolved from a photosensitive spot to the complex mechanism we see (huh!) today.

ibraaaaa 5y ago

https://youtube.com/c/DrJamesTour https://youtube.com/c/DrJamesTour

gliptic 5y ago
https://youtu.be/ghJGnMwRHCs https://youtu.be/ghJGnMwRHCs

dekken_ 5y ago

Organic/non-organic distinction is arbitrary. Life is just complexity manifest.

nathias 5y ago
so is bad code, the distinction is about emergent properties
FabHK 5y ago
To be fair, it was not just "organic", but quite specific organic, namely proteinogenic amino acids that make up proteins.
Socketier 5y ago
That's a really profound sounding way of saying that life is complex and we don't understand it. Or are you saying that we do understand it? If so I'm sure you're in high demand right now.
sdhfjg 5y ago
Are you ok?
desertraven 5y ago
This is succinct and quite eye-opening for me. Would you be willing to elaborate in any direction you please?
- 74B5 5y ago
  Since the beginning of time, things merge. Subatomic "particles" into atoms into molecules into bigger molecules, all directed by physics. Biochemistry, is just chemistry, is just physics.
  - zKqGcn 5y ago
    And physics is just applied mathematics! It's applied complexity all the way down.
  - 5y ago

gibolt 5y ago

Taken from the Ars comments: Article Quote: When Miller showed his results to Urey, the latter suggested a paper should be published as soon as possible. (Urey was senior but generously declined to be listed as co-author, lest this lead to Miller getting little to no credit for the work.) As if Urey doesn't deserve enough respect, the story is better than described: Sub-article Quote: After Miller showed the impressive results to Urey, they decided to submit them to Science. Urey declined Miller’s offer to coauthor the report because otherwise Miller would receive little or no credit. Knowing that a graduate student could have a difficult time getting a paper like this published, Urey contacted the Science editorial office to explain the importance of the work and ask that the paper be published as soon as possible. Urey kept mentioning the results in his lectures, drawing considerable attention from the news media. The manuscript was sent to Science in early February of 1953. Several weeks went by with no news. Growing impatient, Urey wrote to Howard Meyerhoff, chairman of AAAS’s Editorial Board, on 27 February to complain about the lack of progress. Then, on 8 March 1953, the New York Times reported in a short article entitled, “Looking Back Two Billion Years” that W. M. MacNevin and his associates at Ohio State University had performed several experiments simulating the primitive Earth—including a discharge experiment with methane wherein “resinous solids too complex for analysis” were produced. The next day, Miller sent Urey a copy of the clipping with a note saying “I am not sure what should be done now, since their work is, in essence, my thesis. As of today, I have not received the proof from Science, and in the letter that was sent to you, Meyerhoff said that he had sent my note for review.” Infuriated by this news, Urey had Miller withdraw the paper and submit it to the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Ironically, at the same time (11 March), Meyerhoff, evidently frustrated by Urey’s actions, wrote to Miller that he wanted to publish the manuscript as a lead article and that he wanted Miller—not Urey—to make the final decision about the manuscript. Miller immediately accepted Meyerhoff’s offer, the paper was withdrawn from the Journal of the American Chemical Society and returned to Science, and was published on 15 May 1953. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Prebiotic-Soup--Revisiting-the-Miller-Experiment-Bada-Lazcano/2bc88c90298a5a0ce1cbfc7bcabbfa22e9e21cad https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Prebiotic-Soup--Revisi...

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dandotway 5y ago

TL;DR summary: The actual glass the lab flasks were made of mattered. Miller's lab flasks were made of borosilicate glass and this caused more organic compounds to form than a more truly inert Teflon flask. But Earth's crust is over 90% silicates which could have similarly contributed to the formation of organic compounds in ancient pre-life earth.

jonplackett 5y ago
It’s weird how this was the headline of the article but it’s only mentioned very briefly right at the end of the article with very little explanation.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  It’s so that you get to read the whole thing. Granted, it’s written well, so the time reading it has been spent well.
mod 5y ago
I thought the more important fact was that the original experiment produced a bigger variety of aminos than previously thought, discovered by re-examining the original material with modern tech.

AltruisticGapHN 5y ago

"Wherever there are rocks... watch out!" - Alan Watts (context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEE561GhO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEE561GhO8 )

wombatmobile 5y ago

> In addition, they found that the corrosion on the glass also forms millions of tiny pits. The authors think those pits could serve as tiny reaction chambers, also speeding up the rate at which organic molecules form in the experiment. Interesting. Photo please, anyone?

noduerme 5y ago

So the new experiment has three flasks. One is borosilicate, the other two are teflon. One of the teflon flasks has pieces of borosilicate floating in it. Both the teflon flasks failed to reproduce the results of the original experiment. Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon?

anshumankmr 5y ago
>Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon? Shocking
high_byte 5y ago
I might have missed something. says the teflon flasks produced less organic material, but I assumed it was only the teflon without borosilicate? my understanding was that borosilicate contributed to creation of organic materials.
- mrob 5y ago
  "The results: far fewer organic compounds formed in the experiments using just the Teflon flasks." Not the clearest way to phrase it, but I agree it most likely means the loose borosilicate bits worked too.
  - high_byte 5y ago
    that's what I thought. I think they meant "flask", or several "plain teflon flasks" were involved.
nobrains 5y ago
The takeaway is that the silica / silicate in the glass acted as the silica in the rocks and gave a more closer to real-life scenario, so it solidifies the original experiment even more, while noting that the original authors did not intend this.
- noduerme 5y ago

StuntPope 5y ago

Only problem is that the Miller Urey experiment never told us anything about the origin of life. Inorganic to organic compounds, sure. But nobody has ever been able to get from there to cells and DNA.

pfdietz 5y ago
Indeed. There is just enormous amounts of shoddy thinking out there from people on the subject of Origin of Life. I'm particularly annoyed by the non sequitur "the universe is large, so there must (with high probability) be life elsewhere." (If anyone reading this thinks that's a valid argument, go look in a mirror and slap yourself.)
- whaaswijk 5y ago
  Would you like to say a bit more about why that's not a valid argument. To be clear, I'm not saying it is (I don't know enough about the subject to do so) but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. Isn't similar probabilistic reasoning used to explain why evolution by natural selection gives rise to various complex life forms? If so, do you also think that that reasoning is shoddy?
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Let N be the number of places life could arise, and p the probability that life arises in one of those places. That argument is basically "there is a value of N such that for any p > 0, N p is much greater than 1." But that's obviously wrong. For any N, there are values of p > 0 that make the product N p arbitrarily close to 0. The dim intution behind the argument was that p can't be "too small". But given our current understanding of OoL, that's not a justified assumption. p could be exponentially small, if OoL requires some extremely unlikely step. Natural selection is great once the system's reproductive fidelity is good enough to support it. The problem is bridging the gap from small molecules to that system. The smallest system we know of that can independently support Darwinian evolution has billions of atoms.
    - 5y ago

xbmcuser 5y ago

So the ancient belief of 3 elements that led to existence of life is correct. soil, water, fire/lightning,

bborud 5y ago

In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there's a slight pause/discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what. As you move along this axis stuff feels more and more complex, messy and hard to nail down definitively. More practical. More prone to get tripped up by silly mistakes and things you never imagined you had to think about. The new compounds they discovered in the old samples kind of illustrates how much hard work is required to get good answers. You can't just suck on your pipe, scratch your quill on some parchment and exert yourself mentally, you have to scrape gunk out of test-tubes and be really careful and thorough in a highly practical sense. The world is imprecise and gnarly and you kind of have to hope for the best. I really admire people who are capable of wringing results out of goo and specks of dust using gadgets that require calibration that has to be able to distinguish actual good signal from residues of the danish you had for breakfast. (Example not entirely random since one of our engineers eating a danish for lunch in his office made the electrochemical sensors he was working on go absolutely apeshit. Kind of good to know before you evacuate a whole industrial site and send in the people in yellow hazmat suits)

wodenokoto 5y ago
> In my mind STEM topics exist on a scale that has math at one end, then there's a slight pause/discontinuity (as in point 2 in the underpants gnome business plan) before it continues with physics, chemistry, biology and onwards to god knows what. Man there really is an XKCD for everything: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  "Now one speculative [i.e., theoretical] science is said to be nobler than another, either by reason of its greater certitude, or by reason of the higher worth of its subject-matter...Of the practical sciences, that one is nobler which is ordained to a further purpose, as political science is nobler than military science; for the good of the army is directed to the good of the State." Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 5., a. 1
5y ago

DonHopkins 5y ago

Julia Child had a great recipe for Primordial Soup! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973): https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video-the-primordial-soup-with-julia-child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video... Also a great recipe for shark repellent, that she made for the CIA. https://web.archive.org/web/20180408020021/https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2015-featured-story-archive/shark-repellent.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180408020021/https://www.cia.g... >Julia Child and the OSS Recipe for Shark Repellent >“The answer to the threat of man-eating sharks, the scavengers which infest all tropical waters of the world, was announced here today…” (quote from draft OSS/ERE Press Release on the development of a shark repellent; April 13, 1943) And she showed how to bone a chicken on Saturday Night Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSxv6IGBgFQ Previous HN discussion: Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973) [video] (instructure.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467695 Video: The Primordial Soup with Julia Child. (Click on the small thumbnail in the second row with the (>) "play" icon to see the video.) https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video-the-primordial-soup-with-julia-child https://massasoit.instructure.com/courses/346438/pages/video... The National Air and Space Museum used to show this delightful video in its "Life in The Universe" exhibit, in which Julia Child recreates Stanley Miller's famous experiment, cooking up a delicious hot batch of Primordial Soup! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/julia-child-and-the-primordial-soup-35465592/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/julia-child-an... >Julia Child and the Primordial Soup >Scientists don't yet know how life began here on Earth. Mineralogist Bob Hazen, who is profiled in the October issue of Smithsonian, thinks that rocks were key to the development of life. Reporter Helen Fields wrote: >It’s the complexity of the hydrothermal vent environment—gushing hot water mixing with cold water near rocks, and ore deposits providing hard surfaces where newly formed amino acids could congregate—that makes it such a good candidate as a cradle of life. “Organic chemists have long used test tubes,” he says, “but the origin of life uses rocks, it uses water, it uses atmosphere. Once life gets a foothold, the fact that the environment is so variable is what drives evolution." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment >The Miller–Urey experiment (or Miller experiment) was a chemical experiment that simulated the conditions thought at the time (1952) to be present on the early Earth and tested the chemical origin of life under those conditions. The experiment at the time supported Alexander Oparin's and J. B. S. Haldane's hypothesis that putative conditions on the primitive Earth favoured chemical reactions that synthesized more complex organic compounds from simpler inorganic precursors. Considered to be the classic experiment investigating abiogenesis, it was conducted in 1952 by Stanley Miller, with assistance from Harold Urey, at the University of Chicago and later the University of California, San Diego and published the following year. https://www.wired.com/2009/05/dayintech-0515 https://www.wired.com/2009/05/dayintech-0515 >May 15, 1953: Cookin' Up Some Primordial Soup >1953: Stanley Miller, just 23 years old, publishes his landmark work on the production of amino acids, a necessary component of life, in a jar.

rdevsrex 5y ago

It's kind of ironic that both in cosmology and biology we know an incredible amount, but yet we still don't how the universe or life on earth began. Sure, we have educated guesses, but until we can unify QM and GR or produce a cell from simple elements, they remain guesses.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
That's how lots of science works. Especially science involving the past, or science very far away. Even if we do create a "cell" (whatever that means), it will only give us a possible explanation of how it happened on Earth. It will shrink the possible probabilities of all other methods, such as Aliens engineering us, but we cannot reduce all probabilities to zero... without a time machine. Unfortunately we live in a world where even 100% definite in-your-face proof will not convince a frighteningly large %age of humanity. IMHO claiming everything is "still a guess" shows a lack of understanding of science. I'm not judging, because I can't tell what you do and don't know from just three sentences. But it kinda sounds like it.
api 5y ago
There are numerous possibilities for how life began, and whatever process was involved probably took a minimum of millions of years to lead to something self-replicating and stable enough to start adapting. This makes abiogenesis theories likely impossible to directly test over human time scales. Not that we shouldn't try... it's possible that certain conditions can give rise to self-replicating molecular systems that can adapt very quickly. This doesn't prove that these conditions were the exact ones responsible on primordial Earth, but it does prove that the phenomenon of abiogenesis is categorically possible under plausible early Earth conditions. There are lots of other phenomena in nature that may be impossible to directly test. Biological evolution for instance is somewhat testable, but only on a small scale in both time and organismal complexity: http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/ http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/ We can also run computer evolution experiments that validate some of the theoretical assumptions underlying biological evolution in a very abstract way, but these can't validate specific biological hypotheses about physical systems.

eyear 5y ago

Facebook should put more money into this kind of research instead of hiring PR company to change its name.

mrfusion 5y ago

I think the simplest life is at least few orders of magnitude more complex than creating amino acids though. I feel people gloss over this fact.

reubenswartz 5y ago
I don't know if people gloss over it, or it's just a good place to start. It's like if you were wondering how a giant Lego set came to be, you might start with the pieces.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  I think an analogy would be we created some of the lego blocks in this experiment but a single cell would be akin to all the lego creations in the world.

dekhn 5y ago

the original article was used in my graduate program as a list of all the things biologists shouldn't do when working on origin of life. Like, "they got the basic details of the atmosphere wrong". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Evolution_of_Earth's_atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Evolution_...