When Stanley Miller was only 22 years old, he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Under the supervision of Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey, he designed an experiment to simulate the environment of an early, pre-life Earth as closely as possible. After leaving it running for only a couple of days, they came back to discover that inside the chamber had formed things like peptides, amino acids, and nucleic acids, the basic building blocks of life that, over a geological timescale, could very feasibly form organic life.
Nucleic acids have been known, over time, to form themselves into RNA strands, essentially a single stranded DNA molecule. (There are other differences, but that’s the biggest one)
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When Stanley Miller was only 22 years old, he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Under the supervision of Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey, he designed an experiment to simulate the environment of an early, pre-life Earth as closely as possible. After leaving it running for only a couple of days, they came back to discover that inside the chamber had formed things like peptides, amino acids, and nucleic acids, the basic building blocks of life that, over a geological timescale, could very feasibly form organic life.
Nucleic acids have been known, over time, to form themselves into RNA strands, essentially a single stranded DNA molecule. (There are other differences, but that’s the biggest one)