Sidney Walter Fox (24 March 1912 – 10 August 1998) was a Los Angeles-born biochemist responsible for discoveries on the origins of biological systems.
Fox went on to create microspheres that he said closely resembled bacterial cells and concluded that they could be similar to the earliest forms of life or protocells.
[3] Fox obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of California, Los Angeles[4] in Chemistry.
[4] In 1964, Fox moved to the University of Miami where he was a professor and the director of the Institute for Molecular Evolution for 25 years.
[5] Fox also taught at the Southern Illinois University in the Department of Plant Biology as a Distinguished Research Professor.
[4] From there, Fox moved to the University of South Alabama where he was entitled Distinguished Research Scientist in the Marine Sciences department in 1993.
[4] In 1996, 2 years before his death, Fox was elected Fellow of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life or ISSOL.
The gases flowed through the apparatus past two electrodes that produced an electrical charge that acted as the lightning that would have been in the atmosphere before life on Earth.
Stanley Miller and Harold Urey's experiment suggests that life formed from the presence of inorganic molecules, water, and electrical charge.
In this experiment, methane flowed through a concentrated solution of ammonium hydroxide and then into a hot tube containing silica sand at about 1000 °C.
[8] Many other similar experiments were carried out by teams of scientists such as Heyns and Pavel, Oro and Kamat, and Fox and Windsor that led to the production of amino acids.
[8] One of the first experiments by Fox and Kaoru Harada that had to do with the formation of proteinoids was called Thermal Copolymerization of Amino Acids to a Product Resembling Protein.
Fox says in his publications that these temperatures could have been reached in three different scenarios on primordial Earth; hot springs, dried-up lagoons, and pressurized volcanic magma.
To prepare microspheres, Fox added 10 mL of boiling salt solution to the hot proteinoids and stirred carefully.