In 1953, American chemists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller reported the production of biomolecules from simple gaseous starting materials, using an apparatus constructed to simulate the primordial Earth’s atmosphere-ocean system.

In 1952, Stanley Miller, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, approached Harold Urey about doing an experiment to evaluate the possibility that organic compounds important for the origin of life may have been formed abiologically on the early Earth. The experiment was conducted using a custom-built glass apparatus designed to simulate the primitive Earth.