Portal:Chemistry/Selected biography/4

Harold Urey (1893-1981) was an American physical chemist, who won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on isotopes, specifically the discovery of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope, and the production of heavy water. He also performed pioneering research in cosmochemistry, which studies the origin and development of elements and their isotopes, primarily within the solar system. Urey, along with his student Stanley Miller, may be best remembered for the renowned Miller-Urey experiment, which shows that a mixture of ammonia, methane and hydrogen, when exposed to ultraviolet radiation and water, can interact to form amino acids, the "building blocks" of terrestrial life. This experiment followed on from Urey's work on the oxygen isotope 18O, and is considered to be pioneering work in the field of paleoclimatology, as it attempts to explain the composition of the early Earth's atmosphere.