preview

Urey And Miller Experiment Essay

Decent Essays

Urey –Miller Experiment Description of the Urey-Miller Experiment In 1953 Urey and Miller were working at a university of Chicago, directed an experiment which would alternate the method of scientific investigation into the origin of life. Urey and Miller used very basic apparatus to conduct this experiment, they used: • 2 conical flasks • glass tubing • Power supply • methane (CH4) • ammonia (NH3) • hydrogen (H2) • water (H2O) Urey and Miller gathered a closed system which he pumped a mixture of gases that were methane, ammonia and hydrogen. One of the conical flasks was half full of boiling in order to add water vapour to the mixture and the gases were circulated around the apparatus. The gases mixed together created a high voltage electrical spark and then passed through a condenser to cool it down before going through a “trap” cooled in ice to collect any liquid products. Unaffected …show more content…

Urey and Millers experiment showed organic compounds such as amino acids, which are crucial to cellular life. The experimentation begins firstly with a hypothesis, which Urey and Miller used to thoroughly test the hypothetical conditions present on early earth and tested to see what the environmental required to allow life on Earth to begin. The At the end of one week of continuous operation, Miller and Urey observed, by looking at the cooled water, that as much as 10-15% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of organic compounds. 2% of the carbon had formed amino acids, including 13 of the 22 that are used to make proteins in living cells, with glycine as the most abundant. The molecules produced were simple organic molecules, far from a complete living biochemical system.

Get Access