He met Stanley Miller at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), who inspired him to take up the spark discharge experiment a step forward by studying amino acid stability.
This is useful in marine biology, paleontology, and archaeology for dating millions of years old organic materials based on their amino acid content.
[6] This a supports the notion that the organic building blocks of life could be naturally synthesized and were present in the making of the solar system.
He and his team also developed a Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA), which is a microfabricated capillary electrophoresis (CE) instrument for sensitive amino acid biomarker analysis.
Their result showed the synthesis of 22 amino acids and 5 amines, revealing that the original Miller experiment produced many more compounds than previously believed.
[12] In addition Bada also analysed the unreported 1958 samples in 2011, from which 23 amino acids and 4 amines, including 7 organosulfur compounds, were detected.