Miller, then a graduate student under the direction of Harold Urey, a Nobel chemist at the University of Chicago, took a mixture of the four gaseous components thought at the time to be the main constituents of the prebiotic atmosphere—hydrogen, ammonia, methane, and water vapour, and simulated the effect of primordial lightning by passing an electrical discharge through the mixture. The result was dramatic. A range of organic materials, including a number of amino acids, were found to have been formed. Since amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, proteins being a key component of
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