Recently, two hundred vials of chemicals that were used in a 1950s experiment concerning the origins of life have been discovered in a laboratory in California, prompting new tests with regards to the matter.

Half a century ago, chemist Stanley Miller, who was at that time working on his PhD, tested his ideas about life formation under his mentor at the University of Chicago Harold Urey’s supervision.

His groundbreaking experiments aimed at creating electric sparks in a mixture of gases he believed much resembled the Earth’s atmosphere in the early days of existence.

Miller rose to fame when he found traces of amino acids in the products that resulted from his tests, the discovery earning him high praise among scientists.

Amino acids are molecules that stand at the very basis of all forms of life, which rendered the chemist’s findings to be rather blown out of proportions, newspapers revealing back in the 50s that he had recreated life in his lab.

After having found a number of five amino acids, Miller decided to add hot steam to the mixture of gases, in order to recreate similar to those in an erupting volcano conditions.

Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego, Stanley Miller’s former student and the one to whom all the latter’s materials were handed down to, has came across the vials and has performed a series of tests on them using today’s state-of-the-art technology.

Bada and his team of researchers managed to pinpoint twenty-two amino acids by analysing the surviving samples from the old experiments.

Moreover, they reported their studies showed that the gases resulted from a volcano erupting might have well been at the foundation of life on Earth, since they all meshed into what is called a prebiotic soup (the compounds that were present on Earth before life emerged).