In 1953, Stanley Miller ran an electric spark through methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water in a sealed glass loop at the University of Chicago. A week later, the walls were coated in amino acids. Everyone remembers that experiment. Almost nobody remembers what came next.

Between 1957 and 1970, Sidney W. Fox at Florida State University ran a very different rig. He dry-heated mixtures of the 20 biological amino acids to 150–180°C for a few hours, dissolved the resulting glassy solid in warm salt water, and got something extraordinary: proteinoid microspheres. These were 1–2 micron spherules with an osmotically active bilayer-like boundary, they budded, they divided when brought into contact with fresh proteinoid, they showed a resting membrane potential of ~20 mV, and they catalyzed reactions (decarboxylation, ATP hydrolysis, weak esterase activity) without any enzymes present.

Fox published this in Science in 1959, in Nature in 1967, and in a 1972 monograph Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life. Miller himself, meanwhile, had built a continuous-flow apparatus at UC San Diego in 1958 that could run for months, cycling condensates through a simulated tidal zone. Combined, the two lines of work were sketching a testable roadmap from rocks and lightning to something that looked disturbingly like a proto-cell.

Then it died. Three reasons:

• The atmosphere problem (1975). Geochemists showed early Earth was probably CO₂/N₂-rich, not the reducing Miller mixture. Reviewers used this to dismiss the entire program, even though Fox's proteinoids form in CO₂ atmospheres too — just more slowly.
• The RNA World took the money. After Cech and Altman's ribozyme discovery (1982, Nobel 1989), NASA Exobiology and NSF Origins funding pivoted almost entirely to RNA-first models. Proteinoid research lost its grants by 1985.
• Fox oversold. He called the microspheres "protocells" and implied they were near-alive. Peer reviewers, correctly noting they didn't replicate genetic information, threw out the whole finding rather than the interpretation.

Why 2026 makes this viable again. Everything that killed the program has been undone:

• Damer and Deamer's 2015–2023 hydrothermal field hypothesis restored wet-dry cycling as a plausible geochemistry — exactly Fox's regime.
• Sutherland's group at MRC-LMB showed in 2020 that cyanosulfidic chemistry makes amino acids and nucleotides in the same pot, meaning Fox's proteinoids and RNA World aren't rivals — they co-formed.
• Cryo-EM at 2Å can now image a 1-micron proteinoid's bilayer directly. In 1968 Fox had a Zeiss light microscope and darkroom prints.
• Microfluidic droplet reactors (Weitz lab, 2015 onward) can run 10⁶ parallel proteinoid formation experiments a day with varied composition, temperature, and pH — the combinatorial search Fox couldn't do.
• Modern mass spec (Orbitrap) can sequence the actual peptide chains in a single microsphere. Fox had to guess.

A modern reconstruction of Fox's rig would cost about $400,000 — less than one postdoc-year at NASA. It would answer, definitively, whether a peptide-first path to compartmentalized proto-metabolism exists. Instead, the microspheres sit in Fox's archived slides at Southern Illinois University, and origin-of-life funding still flows almost entirely to RNA.