To show how amino acids--life’s building-blocks--could have formed on the early Earth, the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment used a simulated hydrogen-rich atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor. By 1970, though, most geochemists were convinced that the Earth’s primitive atmosphere was nothing like this, but instead consisted of gasses emitted from volcanoes--mainly carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor. [2]
Sidney Fox and Klaus Dose reported in 1977 that no amino acids are produced by sparking a carbon dioxide-nitrogen-water vapor mixture. In 1983, Miller himself reported that he could produce no more than a small amount of the simplest amino acid (glycine) by sparking an atmosphere containing carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and then only if free hydrogen was added. And Miller conceded that glycine was the best he could do in the absence of methane. In 1984, Heinrich Holland confirmed that mixtures of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor yield no amino acids at all. [3] Perhaps Ussery was ignorant of these facts.
Footnotes:
[2] On the probable composition of the Earth’s early atmosphere, see Heinrich D. Holland, “Model for the Evolution of the Earth’s Atmosphere,†pp. 447-477 in A. E. J. Engel, Harold L. James & B. F. Leonard (editors), Petrologic Studies: A Volume in Honor of A. F. Buddington (Geological Society of America, 1962); Philip H. Abelson, “Chemical Events on the Primitive Earth,†Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 55 (1966): 1365-1372; Marcel Florkin, “Ideas and Experiments in the Field of Prebiological Chemical Evolution,†Comprehensive Biochemistry 29B (1975): 231-260; Sidney W. Fox & Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life, Revised Edition (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977).
[3] On the inability of a Miller-Urey-type experiment to produce amino acids under realistic early Earth conditions, see Sidney W. Fox & Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life, pp. 43, 74-76; Heinrich D. Holland, The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 99-100; Gordon Schlesinger & Stanley L. Miller, “Prebiotic Synthesis in Atmospheres Containing CH4, CO, and CO2: I. Amino Acids,†Journal of Molecular Evolution 19 (1983): 376-382, p. 376. See also John Horgan, “In the Beginning...,†Scientific American (February, 1991): 116-126, p. 121.