Biology: Primordial Soup

The Soup of Life.

Primordial soup was the chemical mixture thought to represent the atmosphere of the early Earth, composed of ammonia, hydrogen, methane gas, and water vapor. It is a chemically rich mixture but not apparently conducive to living things. Even before 1960 scientists began to show that primordial soup could produce the types of chemicals of which life is made, but a 1960 report by Juan Oro in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications made an important advance in the subject.

Cooking the Soup.

It had already been found that amino acids formed in primordial soup by performing experiments using electric sparks as simulated lightning. Stanley Miller had shown that hydrogen cyanide (HCN) was an important intermediate chemical in forming amino acids, which make up proteins. The question was, How did the all-important DNA or RNA required for life form? Oro took HCN gas and bubbled it into...

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