Miller-Urey experiment
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The Miller-Urey experiment was a 1953 experiment that synthesized the environmental conditions that were thought to be present at the origin of life. The intention was to observe if abiogenesis could have taken place under the circumstances then believed to represent the early earth; the result, after passing an electrical discharge through an atmosphere made up mostly of methane, ammonia, water, and elemental hydrogen was a water soup of various amino acids and a few other recognizable biomolecules.
The state of understanding of early Earth chemistry has changed somewhat since then (a nitrogen-carbon dioxide atmosphere is now considered more likely than Miller and Urey's mixture), but even though the Miller-Urey conditions are no longer widely accepted, the experiment did successfully prove that the basic building blocks of life could form spontaneously in nature without intelligent intervention.
Also the name is kind of funny because Harold Urey's last name sounds like urea, which was the first synthesized organic molecule, from the experiment that disproved vitalism. It also sounds like something else, but we're all grownups here.
