Laboratory experiments have shown how easy it is to produce a number of biochemical monomers under reducing conditions. Such empirical support began to accumulate in 1953, when Stanley L. Miller, then a graduate student working with Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, achieved the first successful synthesis of organic compounds under plausible primordial conditions The action of electric discharges acting for a week over a mixture of CH4, NH3, H2, and H2O; racemic mixtures of several proteinic amino acids were produced, as well as hydroxy acids, urea, and other organic molecules (Miller 1953). The easiness of formation in one-pot reactions of amino acids, purines, and pyrimidines strongly suggest these molecules and many others were components of the prebiotic broth (cf. Miller and Lazcano, 2002).