Stanley Miller, 1997. Photo by Kevin Walsh. Courtesy office of Stanley Miller, University of California, San Diego. Stanley Miller (1930–) When Nobel laureate Harold Urey gave a lecture in 1951 encouraging scientists to investigate how biomolecules might have come into being billions of years ago in the primordial soup, he hadn’t counted on a graduate student at his own university taking him to heart. But young California native Stanley Miller was inspired by the talk to join Urey’s research group at the University of Chicago, where he carried out his now-famous experiment. In this experiment Miller subjected a simulated early-earth atmosphere (hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor) to electrical sparks, and within days he was able to observe amino acids in the mixture. This didn’t solve all the riddles of how self-replicating life came to be, but it sparked great interest in prebiotic chemical evolution and led to countless other experiments. Miller has spent his post-graduate career at the University of California at San Diego investigating the origins of life. He has been able to produce many other compounds necessary for life under conditions thought to be present early in Earth’s history. The field of prebiotic chemistry also has significance for the search for life elsewhere in the solar system. If scientists can understand the conditions under which life emerged on Earth, they will be better equipped to look for primitive life elsewhere. While some of the assumptions of Miller’s original experiment have been questioned (for example, the nature of Earth’s atmosphere when life began), his experiment still heralded the beginning of prebiotic chemistry as an experimental science.