May 15, 2003 marked the fiftieth anniversary of a paper published in the journal I that revolutionized our thinking about one of the fundamental scientific questions that confronts humanity-how did life began on Earth? The paper was authored by Stanley L. Miller (1953), at that time a graduate student of Nobel Laureate Harold Urey’s at the University of Chicago. The experiment described in his paper demonstrated how, by using a simple apparatus designed to mimic the ocean-atmosphere system of Earth, could be used to synthesize essential biological compounds such as amino acids. If a similar type of process had taken place on early Earth, this could have produced the raw materials needed for the origin of life.

Bada, J.L. 2003. Origins of life. Oceanography 16(3):98–104, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.38.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.