What did Miller and Urey show in their experiment that Oparin did not? ?
Oparin-Haldane proposed a primal atmosphere that was reducing. Oparin and Haldane did not experiment. Miller/Urey created an atmosphere that was suggested by the Oparin-Haldane Theory. The gases they used were methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2), and water (H2O). They added electric arcs and UV light. The initial experiment ran for one week. Two percent of the carbon had formed some of the amino acids which are used to make proteins. Perhaps most importantly, Miller’s experiment showed that organic compounds such as amino acids, which are essential to cellular life, could be made easily under the conditions that scientists believed to be present on the early earth. This experiment lead to the theory of the primal soup. If so much pre cellular compounds could be produced in such a short time it was assumed that the earth, over millions of years, could product those compounds and others.
