A jar of gas and a spark of 'lightning' produced the building blocks of life

In 1952, Stanley Miller sealed water vapour, methane, ammonia and hydrogen into a flask meant to mimic early Earth's atmosphere, then ran an electrical spark through it for a week to simulate lightning. The mixture turned pink, then red — and analysis found amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, formed from nothing but simple gases and electricity. It became the founding experiment in research on how life's raw materials could arise naturally.

— Stanley Miller, A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions — Science, 1953