It is named after its creator, Sol Spiegelman, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who first described it in 1965.
[1][2] After a while, Spiegelman took some RNA and moved it to another tube with fresh solution.
This short RNA sequence replicated very quickly in these unnatural circumstances.
They found that under the right conditions the Qβ replicase can spontaneously generate RNA which evolves into a form similar to Spiegelman's Monster.
[4] Eigen built on Spiegelman's work and produced a similar system further degraded to just 48 or 54 nucleotides—the minimum required for the binding of the replication enzyme, this time a combination of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and T7 RNA polymerase.