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

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/scientists-recreated-classic-origin-of-life-experiment-and-made-a-new-discovery/

by sohkamyung • 5 years ago

409 202 5 years ago

arstechnica.com

ibraaaaa• 5 years ago

https://youtube.com/c/DrJamesTour

gliptic7• 5 years ago

https://youtu.be/ghJGnMwRHCs

dekken_6• 5 years ago

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

desertraven• 5 years ago

This is succinct and quite eye-opening for me. Would you be willing to elaborate in any direction you please?

74B5• 5 years 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.

nmaleki• 5 years ago

The commenter is likely referring to complexity from simplicity, best shown in Stephen Wolfram's Rule 30. I'll be talking about this topic, and its implications, at length in an upcoming video on https://recursion.is/youtube.

taneq2• 5 years ago

We’re all just pretentious chemical reactions.

dekken_6• 5 years ago

trying to minimize our own action

mypastself• 5 years ago

We have such a limited understanding of life that calling it “just” anything, at least with any degree of confidence, seems unfounded.

Our definitions are somewhat inadequate and full of edge cases and blurred lines. It doesn’t mean we should dismiss them out of hand, especially since the circumstances of life’s origin are so mistifying.

secondaryacct• 5 years ago

It s not mistifying that much if you look at the chemical timescale. Give me 2 bn years and see where I go. Try to imagine what that amount of time for random permutation can give in the entire space of the universe and you're bound to have a self reproducing machine popping up once.

sabellito• 5 years ago

Is this your area of expertise? I'm asking because making this distinction does sound useful to me, but I'm no biologist nor philosopher.

dekken_6• 5 years ago

I didn't say it wasn't useful. My comment is in terms of physics rather than biology or chemistry. i.e. in physics, there is little difference but complexity between a rock and a human.

robbiep• 5 years ago

The philosophical name for this concept is panpsychism.

Personally, I’m a panentropist (my own creation) - I hold that the spectrum of life/consciousness varies depending on the level of entropy. So a flame has a higher level of consciousness than a piece of paper and oxygen molecules. But when you combine them they increase their level. It’s weird but it might be correct - doesn’t address issues of the hard problem of consciousness however

nathias• 5 years ago

so is bad code, the distinction is about emergent properties

JimWestergren• 5 years ago

Very interesting. From a book? Please elaborate :)

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

carbon is probably the only atom with enough chemistry for that complexity to manifest. half of chemistry is organic chemistry

GoblinSlayer3• 5 years ago

By organic here are meant aminoacids specifically and possibly their polymers.

FabHK4• 5 years ago

To be fair, it was not just "organic", but quite specific organic, namely proteinogenic amino acids that make up proteins.

Socketier2• 5 years 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.

gibolt• 5 years 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--Revisi...

dandotway• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

"Wherever there are rocks... watch out!" - Alan Watts

(context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEE561GhO8 )

thriftwy• 5 years 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

adrian_b• 5 years 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.

wombatmobile• 5 years 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?

noduerme2• 5 years 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?

high_byte2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

nobrains• 5 years 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.

noduerme2• 5 years ago

what I mean is, how do they know that's what helped the reaction? The other two flasks were of a different material, but the same as each other. How do they know that material A aided the reaction as opposed to concluding that material B impeded it?

alisonkisk2• 5 years ago

One of the teflon flasks had glass in it.

StuntPope• 5 years 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.

pfdietz22• 5 years 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• 5 years 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?

FabHK4• 5 years ago

never told us anything about the origin of life

There are several steps to go from no life to life as we know it. This experiment illuminates one of those steps. How is that "nothing"?

ballenf• 5 years ago

It's kind of like saying learning to jump really high is the first step to getting to the moon.

dekhn7• 5 years ago

this experiment only reduces the uncertaintly that the building blocks are widely available. The big problem wiht this experiment is that it misestimated the nature of the early atmosphere and os they basically simulated another planet. We don't know if any other planets have life, so simulating another planet isn't useful to illuminate anything about life on earth.

phonypc• 5 years ago

It doesn't tell us nothing, it's just not the whole story. And why should one expect a single experiment to tell the whole story?

TheRealDunkirk• 5 years ago

It would seem that the next logical experiment is to take Miller-Urey as a given, throw a perfect blend of polymer chains into the "soup," and see if they can start forming RNA chains. I thought I had read about such an experiment, but I can't find a reference to it now. Anything coming up in Google for me is being obfuscated by this recent study, and mRNA COVID vaccine stuff.

mannykannot6• 5 years ago

I think what the naysayers are missing is that if this experiment had failed to generate any of the sort of organic molecules strongly associated with life, that would have shaken things up - or would you have been just as eager to dismiss this experiment in that case?

SavantIdiot3• 5 years ago

I think this is the fallacy of arguing the middle usually deployed against science.

There's a great example of Futurama, where the evolutionary naysayer demands an intermediate form, and Farnsworth shows him one... then he demands another, and Farnsworth shows THAT form... and this cycle repeats hundreds of times until Farnsworth has no intermediate form and the naysayer declares victory.

xbmcuser• 5 years ago

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

bborud5• 5 years 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)

snowwrestler2• 5 years ago

I try to keep this in mind when reviewing predictions, speculation, and fiction about artificial intelligences that get super intelligent. There’s more to knowledge than just calculating faster. Hypotheses need to be tested by experimentation; theories must be supported by evidence. (This is not my original idea, I read it in an essay from an AI researcher.)

This is also why there is more to science than statistical analysis. Stats help us understand evidence we have collected. But at some point a new idea needs a new test in order to know if it is useful or correct.

shmageggy• 5 years 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.

https://xkcd.com/435/

bborud5• 5 years ago

Holy crap! :)

HPsquared• 5 years ago

And mathematics is just applied philosophy, philosophy is just applied language, and language is again one of those "social studies"...

azalemeth• 5 years ago

I've been lucky enough to work with a few highly skilled organic chemists, and I know enough chemistry to know that I could never, ever join them as such. It's such a niche, specialised, and important and yet under-recognised set of skills.

A few examples. The order in which you add nominally unimportant reagents to a reaction can significantly matter – the enthalpy of mixing is non-zero, and so if you dissolve A and then B in solvent C before letting it reflux for five hours (say), it will be a different initial condition to adding B, then A. Many (most?) chemists weigh vials before adding a mass of x g/mg of a compound, in the process of adding that, and then again when they have removed "x" grams. Lids are pared with volumetric flasks. Tiny variations matter. Room humidity, temperature, and the history of the use of the equipment involved may change the answers. I had one graduate student (who came top in her year in chemistry) make an isotopically labelled molecule for me, with a ~70% yield and a ~100% labelling purity. A few years later, a biochemist following the "recipe" she developed (and beautifully illustrated!) was unable to get above 10% yield and about 80% purity. I never really was able to work out why. Any "debugging" conversation starts with "tell me exactly -- what did you do?". Things occasionally don't go "as well" when certain contaminants are (not) present. The debugger for reality sucks.

And still, despite all the fiddly nature of the work, it's downright dangerous. Organic chemists, as a species, live less long. They get blown up and gassed. I've been in a building when a "small scale" reaction has exploded and you feel the vibrations of it – nobody was seriously injured because the fume hood's shock sensors detected the azide derivatives decomposing rapidly and, within microseconds, dumped a load of cold CO2 down the front of the hood, stopping combustion and redirecting/reducing the blast. Another acquaintance of mine managed to have the building evacuated after ordering a 10 ml bottle of a compound he distilled from a hops extract and identified via GC-MSMS and MS^n spectrometry as part of a project trying to understand beer foam (and make better non-alcoholic beers; this is in about 2000 or 1999, before "good" alcoholfrei bier was available) – he naïvely opened the lid to see what it smelt like outside of the fume hood, and immediately uncontrollably vomited. So did his neighbours. Then the rest of the room. Then the floor. They closed it over a weekend, opened all the doors and windows, put in industrial fans, and it still stank for months.

Chemists do important, undervalued work. They make drugs, materials, batteries. They do everything from quantum mechanics to what I still consider to be not far removed from alchemy. Some of them are slightly odd people, but they are usually very fun to share a drink with...

dekhn7• 5 years ago

tertiary amines, man. That's the reason I couldn't be an organic chemist. If you don't like the smell of decaying fish, it's tough.

Also pretty much everything in OC ends up being a yucky resin at the bottom of a flask you can't remove.

When I visited my grad school for the first time, there were ambulances and firetrucks outside the building. I went to the main office and there were EMTs everywhere and firemen. Turns out, they were doing spring cleaning of a fume hook and accidentally touched a bottle of ether. The ether had formed free radicals over time, and just touching the bottle caused it to expose, popping all the windows out 20 feet away. The chemist's face was permanently scarred (although his life was safed by the safety glass). That was later my office, although I did mostly computational work.

bborud5• 5 years ago

speaking of dicey chemistry, I'm sure you have already read the book, but to anyone else who hasn't: "Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" by John Drury Clark (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_) made me realize two things: 1) I'm glad I didn't pursue a career in chemistry as I would doubtless have been drawn to things that are "interesting", 2) people who do "interesting" things in chemistry have the best stories.

smitty1110• 5 years ago

azide derivatives decomposing rapidly

I got some major "Things I Won't Work With" vibes reading that. Checked the archives and yep, that's a repeat offender right there.

Osiris• 5 years ago

Stories like this are what make me so frustrated with the "anti-science" rhetoric you hear in politics coming from the same people that carry a miniature computer in their pocket that's the result of (wild guess) millions of man hours of research in physics, chemistry, and many forms of engineering.

The people that do this work are ACTUALLY making the world a better place.

taeric4• 5 years ago

I mean. I am not trying to underscore the work. But I feel you are making it sound magical. This is not much different than cooking, is it? Try making bread or beer by adding things out of order.

I feel so much of this mysticism is driven by over reliance on associative and distributive laws for elementary math. And it is super annoying because I know I do the same thing.

localhost• 5 years ago

We didn't have fancy fume hoods like that back in the day. Do you have a link to the device used in that fume hood? I only found this [1] but it doesn't sound like the device you're talking about.

[1] https://www.labmanager.com/how-it-works/fume-hood-fire-prote...

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

Another anecdote (because it's Friday): We hired a chemist from a big rocket company into our computer company. He designed organic flammable compounds (rocket fuel) that got made in a clean room in vats and packed into tubes by technicians. They scraped the rapidly-hardening stuff with paddles and smeared it into the tubes. If they left any, the vat was toast and had to be replaced.

So they would try really hard to get it all, scraping the sides and sometimes jamming the paddle down on recalcitrant bits to get them unstuck.

My friend was very nervous about this, and so looked for another job, which was how I met him.

Not long after he was working with us, he got a call and turned white. He explained: the fellow hired in after him was standing behind a technician when the batch went up, turning them both into crackly bits of toast. That could have been him.

Anyway, no I'm not cut out to be an organic chemist.

wodenokoto• 5 years 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/

ARandomerDude• 5 years 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

8note• 5 years ago

I think philosophy sits on either end, making it a circle

DonHopkins• 5 years ago

Julia Child had a great recipe for Primordial Soup!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child

Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973):

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.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

Previous HN discussion:

Julia Child Cooks Primordial Soup (1973) [video] (instructure.com)

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 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-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

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

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• 5 years 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.

api• 5 years 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/

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.

SavantIdiot3• 5 years 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.

interestica2• 5 years 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....

gradschoolfail• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

I think you ended up on the wrong thread

interestica2• 5 years ago

Yeah what. How did that happen. There's no redemption here or some tangential way I can relate this....

slowmovintarget• 5 years ago

Somewhat related to this article, though it seems you're commenting on something else: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/recoving-the-rec...

eyear• 5 years ago

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

mrfusion2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

mrfusion2• 5 years 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.

dekhn7• 5 years 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_...

evancoop• 5 years 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• 5 years 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/ 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• 5 years 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.

dekhn7• 5 years 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).

giardini• 5 years ago

My inorganic chemistry prof was fond of saying organic chemistry experiments "usually fail if the labware is too clean"!B-))

ldehaan• 5 years 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.

briffid• 5 years ago

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

qvrjuec• 5 years 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• 5 years 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...

https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cos...

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/scientists-fin...

xor99• 5 years 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.

gaoshan• 5 years 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?

dekhn7• 5 years 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.

freeflight2• 5 years 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.

raxxorrax2• 5 years 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.

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

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