The result, after several days, was a sludgy brown stain at the bottom of the reaction vessel a stain that proved to contain amino acids.

ECONOMIST: Stanley Miller

So the last step on the winding road was the creation of a bacterial strain without any restriction-enzyme genes, and thus without restriction enzymes, so that the team could have a purified reaction vessel in which the new genome could do its thing.

ECONOMIST: Artificial lifeforms

The third mistake was that, because the workers were allowed to bypass the time-consuming mixing process in the tower, with its automatic controls for preventing such things happening, they were free to dump their material into a vessel that was not designed to prevent the accumulation of a critical mass sufficient to support a chain reaction.

ECONOMIST: All over in a flash