In looking into the stories of biological discovery, I also began to find something else, a collection of scientists, usually brilliant occasionally half-mad, who made the discoveries.
The unit experiments like mad on everything from how to type tax collection letters in order to maximize participation to how to improve energy efficiency.
He thus put together a collection of apparatus that would not have disgraced the set of a mad-scientist horror film, and filled it with a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour that matched contemporary ideas of what the primitive terrestrial atmosphere had been composed of.