Scientist who sought secret of life in lab dies

By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Stanley Miller, a scientist who pioneered research more than half a century ago in creating the primitive building blocks of life in a laboratory, has died at age 77, officials said on Wednesday.

Seeking to understand how life emerged from the ingredients of the universe, Miller in 1953 mixed basic gases approximating the Earth's early atmosphere with an electric charge inside a glass chamber and produced amino acids, a building block of life.

"The origin of life is a relatively easy thing and there's a wide variety of conditions under which it will take place," Miller told Reuters in a 1996 interview.

"If you've got the same starting materials and the same conditions, you're going to get the same compounds, that's for sure," he said. "The real question is whether or not there are very chance elements in the formation of life."

Miller began his research in 1950 as a graduate student at the University of Chicago under Nobel laureate Harold Urey and started his experiments in 1952. After publishing the results in the journal Science in 1953, he gained widespread attention.

Scientists appeared on the cusp of achieving genesis in the laboratory but, over the next half century, creating life from scratch eluded researchers.

LITTLE TRICKS

"Making the amino acids made it seem like the rest of the steps would be very easy. It's turned out that it's more difficult than I thought it would be," Miller said in the 1996 interview.

"It's a series of little tricks. Once you learn the trick it's very easy. The problem is learning the trick."

Other scientists, including Guenter Waechtershaeuser, have since come up with alternate theories about how life came about on Earth.

"His biggest contribution was the boldness to try to actually do experiments and these were the first successful experiments in the field," Waechtershaeuser said in telephone interview from his home in Munich, Germany.

"Miller got these very stunning results and that got the whole world fired up on the origin of life issue and it hasn't let up since."

Yet Waechtershaeuser, a patents attorney with a doctorate in chemistry, has won growing fame in recent years by arguing that Miller and other mainstream scientists have been looking in the wrong places to understand the creation of life.

Instead of seeing the source of life in what is dubbed a "prebiotic soup" of chemicals present before biology emerged, Waechtershaeuser believes life emerged on a flat area where mineral surfaces could spark chemical processes leading to living cells.

He says such a process could happen on the ocean floor near undersea volcanic vents.