Sir

Your interesting 2002 annual scientific anniversary Commentary “1902 and all that” by J. L. Heilbron and W. F. Bynum (Nature 415, 15–18; 2002), credits Stanley Lloyd Miller and Harold Urey as the first to find amino acids in the silent electrical discharge, in 1953. But in 1913, Walther Löb had found glycine in the silent electrical discharge in a reducing atmosphere.

Löb had been looking for the formation of amino acids, especially glycine, at least as early as 1909. Oskar Baudisch (1913) also showed that amino acids are generated by ultraviolet light only in a reducing atmosphere. J. S. Haldane (1929) referred to the work of Edward Baly et al. (1922), who found glycine using ultraviolet light.

Urey and colleagues had published at least three papers on the chemical effects of electrical discharges in gas in 1928 and 1929, so the field of electrochemistry of gases was well known to him and others at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. Miller's contribution was to repeat the experiments of Löb, Baudisch and Baly et al. with more sophisticated modern techniques which were not available to previous authors, such as two-dimensional paper chromatography and elution from Dowex 50.