Stanley Miller was born in Oakland, California, and earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, before attending the University of Chicago for his doctoral studies. It was in Chicago that Miller would perform the experiments that would shape his career, despite an initial preference for theory over 'messy' and 'time-consuming' experiments. Following a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, Miller joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1955. In 1960 he was recruited by his mentor Harold Urey to the brand-new San Diego campus of the University of California, where he spent the remainder of his career until his death on 20 May 2007.
The story of Miller's defining achievement begins in 1951, when, as a new graduate student at the University of Chicago, Miller attended a lecture given by Harold Urey on the subject of the origin of the solar system. Urey described the conditions under which Earth and the other planets would have formed and suggested an outline for the conditions under which life presumably had arisen. Theories for the origin of life, in 1951 and still today, can be partitioned into two broad competing philosophies: autotrophy and heterotrophy. An autotrophic organism is characterized by its ability to grow and reproduce by synthesizing everything it needs, requiring only the most basic inorganic materials and an energy source, such as sunlight or various gradients. In contrast, heterotrophic organisms are simpler because they do not rely on making all of their nutrients themselves, but instead must scavenge some of their complex organic building blocks from the environment. Heterotrophy, articulated most famously with Darwin's suggestion that life arose from a 'warm little pond', had long been a familiar concept, but this begged the question of where the building blocks for life—amino acids, nucleic acid bases and sugars, among others—would have come from. Urey believed that for the origin of life to be most plausible, these biological starting materials should have been formed as the result of relatively robust and likely natural processes. These ideas intrigued Miller, and he eventually approached Urey with the proposal of studying the abiotic synthesis of organic biomolecules under prebiotic conditions for his thesis project.
