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?
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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....
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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?
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_...
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:
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
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.
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
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.
[+] [-] evancoop|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] dekhn|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] thereisnospork|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] giardini|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
Couldn't the takeaway here be that life is allergic to Teflon?
[+] [-] nobrains|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] high_byte|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anshumankmr|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gibolt|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] interestica|4 years ago|reply
There's a future where the art of charred oak barrel bourbon is lost and scientists try to recreate it in glass vessels....
[+] [-] slowmovintarget|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gradschoolfail|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinmchugh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reubenswartz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dandotway|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekken_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mypastself|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sabellito|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gameswithgo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desertraven|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Socketier|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoblinSlayer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabHK|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathias|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JimWestergren|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdhfjg|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] StuntPope|4 years ago|reply
Inorganic to organic compounds, sure. But nobody has ever been able to get from there to cells and DNA.
[+] [-] FabHK|4 years ago|reply
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"?
[+] [-] phonypc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|4 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] rdevsrex|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wombatmobile|4 years ago|reply
Interesting. Photo please, anyone?
[+] [-] bborud|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] gaoshan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackmorris|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] thriftwy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xor99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AltruisticGapHN|4 years ago|reply
(context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iEE561GhO8 )
[+] [-] briffid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qvrjuec|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldehaan|4 years ago|reply