Stanley Lloyd Miller is most noted for his experiments that attempted to replicate the chemical conditions that may have first given rise to life on earth. In the early 1950s he demonstrated that amino acids could have been created under primordial conditions. Amino acids are the fundamental units of life; they join together to form proteins, and as they grow more complex they eventually become nucleic acids, which are capable of replicating. Miller has hypothesized that the oceans of primitive earth were a mass of molecules, a prebiological "soup," which over the course of a billion years became a living system.

Miller was born in Oakland, California, on March 7, 1930, the youngest of two children. His father, Nathan Harry Miller, was an attorney and his mother, Edith Levy Miller, was a homemaker. Miller attended the University of California at Berkeley and received his B.S. degree in 1951. He began...