Jeffrey L. Bada

As a marine geochemist, Bada made significant research in geochronology. During the 1970s and 1980s he developed an important technique of marine sediment dating through the measurement of the racemisation rates of amino acids. This method is useful for dating a large span in geological time scale. This is useful in marine biology, palaeontology and archaeology for dating millions of years old organic materials based on their amino acid content.[1][4]

Bada is a leading scientist in the study of organic compounds outside of the Earth. Among his works was the analysis of the Martian meteorite Nakhla, which fell in Egypt in 1911. His team found aspartic acid, glutamic acids, glycine, alanine, beta-alanine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid as the most abundant amino acids in the meteorite.[5] 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.[6] The device is useful in planetary exploration such as for the analysis of even trace amounts of amino acids, mono- and diaminoalkanes, amino sugars, nucleobases, and nucleobase degradation products from living and non-living materials.[7]

Jeffrey Bada is best known for his research on the origin of life, following his mentor Miller, whose laboratory he inherited. In fact his most famous works, perhaps, are his reassessment and validation of the original Miller's experiments.[8][9] In 1999, Miller had a stroke and on thinking of his medical condition, he donated everything in his office to Bada's laboratory.[3] Just before Miller's death in 2007, several cardboard boxes containing vials of dried residues were found in his laboratory at UCSD. The labels indicated that some were from Miller's original 1952–1954 experiments, produced by using three different apparatuses, and one from 1958, which included H₂S in the gaseous mixture for the first time and the result never published. In 2008 Bada and his team reported a re-analysis of the 1952 samples using more sensitive techniques, such as high-performance liquid chromatography and liquid chromatography–time of flight mass spectrometry. 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.[10] Miller's report of 1953 mentioned synthesis of only glycine, α- and β-alanine, with uncertain aspartic acid and GABA.[11] 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.[12][13][14][15]