Fox, Sydney

Sydney Fox maintained that proteins, the building blocks of life, had formed by chance from amino acids and carried out an experiment in an attempt to demonstrate this. (See Fox Experiment, the.)

Under the influence of Miller’s scenario, Fox combined various amino acids and produced molecules he named “proteinoids”. However, these functionless amino acid chains had nothing to do with the actual proteins that compose living things. In fact, all of Fox’s endeavors documented that life could not be produced in the laboratory, let alone come into being by chance.