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In the 1950s, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, scientists at the University of Chicago, exposed a sealed flask full of the inorganic chemicals that may have been present in the atmosphere of the early Earth to an electrical current. Amino acids, the organic chemical precursors to proteins, were generated. They showed that it was theoretically possible for lightning strikes in an atmosphere full of their inorganic ingredients to generate some of the organic precursors to life. Many scientists now think that the early Earth may have had an atmosphere with a different composition to the one that Miller and Urey experimented with.