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.