World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth.
The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections.
Many molecules for life can exist in two distinct forms, each the mirror image of the other. The DNA of all living organisms is made from “right-handed” nucleotides, while proteins, the building blocks of cells, are made from “left-handed” amino acids. Why nature works this way is unclear: life could have chosen left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins instead.
The fresh concerns over the technology are revealed in a 299-page report and a commentary in the journal Science. While enthusiastic about research on mirror molecules, the report sees substantial risks in mirror microbes and calls for a global debate on the work.
Evil microbes with little goatees…
This was immediately my thought haha
It’s cool, America has RFK Jr. So…
…it’s not cool, actually
Oh, great… Certainly no laboratory in some Les amicable country will continue this research to try to take a stab at fame…
Oh, new Rimworld
war crimemod idea!Did they create some organism yet?
I believe creating life from non living parts available in nature has a great importance in proving that life could definitely have been originated like that. This would have several consequences to how we view the world.
As for the risks, they could agree on destroying all the created life after recording and documenting the results
What if they miss one and it multiplies out of sight. Now it’s out, forever. Impossible to undo. Because Ricky was a little hungover and spilled a drop without noticing.
Mirror bacteria are just like the normal bacteria around us every day, except if you look at them under a microscope they all have evil looking goatees.
Sure. Why not. Add it to the pile.
And here I thought my late 2024 anxiety level was maxed out already.
lol don’t worry about it, you’ll be long dead from global warming by the time it’s developed
It gets worse. They are also working on mirror physics, where they launch orbiting observatories made of antimatter. What could possibly go wrong.
Activate the omega-13… 48 times.
I love the movie Galaxy Quest.
It’s a ROCK! IT DOESN’T HAVE ANY VULNERABLE SPOTS!
Funny line, definitely untrue of most rocks though
Fight a rock monster barehanded then!
“GET OFF THE LINE GUY!”
Would you not fight it with a hammer and chisel? Or like a jack hammer?
If my learnings have taught me anything, you would fight rock with paper
Antimatter does not replicate the way microbes do to be fair. It’s dangerous to handle in large enough amounts obviously, be we don’t have the energy to produce enough to create a serious danger nor the technology to store that amount at once.
Ya the total amount of antimatter ever produced is something insaly small like 10 nanograms
Just to put that in perspective for me, anti-vaxxers world wide have used the adverse effects the original covid vaccines could have to drum up support for right-wingers in many countries. In my mind, the covid cospiracies are one of the prime reasons why right wingers are so popular today.
As far as I understood, the reason why adverse effects could occure when being vaccinated (they could also occur if you get covid btw, so you are no safer not getting vaccinated), is because the spike protein was similar enough in shape to a protein the body uses. And if you are unlucky, your body develops an immunity response to the spike protein in such a way, that your body-own protein also triggers that immunity response.
So with covid, we already have an example of what could happen if similarly-looking proteins are used by viruses or bacteria. If I have gotten this correctly, the world would not survive an outbreak of the ‘mirror flu’.
I get what you’re saying. Sorry people are misinterpreting and misconstruing your comment and making you out to be some sort of evil antivaxxer. You’re right in the way that pathogens exploit these quirks to their full extent and would be an invisible threat if they managed to mimic our molecules and become undetectable and indestructible to our immune system by their very nature.
Although you’re right about how autoimmunity generally works, the molecular mimicry causing autoimmunity that you mentioned is the exact opposite of the experts’ concerns. For example, left-handed pathogens’ topology (the molecular surface that the immune system “feels” for and detects) would be a mirror image, so there’s probably no risk of autoimmunity since it’s entirely different to your own proteins from your immune system’s point of view.
But the main concern is how our immune systems are simply not be equipped to handle the mirror molecules once detected. It’d be unable to break them down via precise enzymatic degradation, which in turn would limit recognition via antigen presentation from one cell to another down the line, rendering our body unable to coordinate. We’d need to evolve an entirely new set of enzymes and strategies to handle this.
Here’s a better article that makes a better job at explaining the experts’ concerns:
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-mirror-bacteria-pose-global-health.htmlThank you for that explanation and extra source.
Sorry people are misinterpreting and misconstruing your comment and making you out to be some sort of evil antivaxxer.
Reading comprehension, even in a place like this where most people are relatively educated, has completely gone down the shitter.
I just skimmed their comment, and it was clear to me from the first couple sentences that this person isn’t anti-vax…
Despite there being no evidence at for what you’re claiming here, if you think about it for a second, you’d realize the spike protein isn’t some sort of artificial substance being put into your body by a vaccine, but is atom for atom identical to the spike proteins found on different variants of covid.
If you get sick with covid, your body contains unfathomably more spike proteins than you would get from a hundred covid immunizations. And, if you’ve gotten an immunization, your immune system can keep the amount of virus in your system much lower.
It’s ok to just not like the idea of the covid immunizations. Making stuff up to try to justify your belief, however…
Maybe I worded my post badly, I never claimed that you shouldn’t get vaccinated for covid. I just remember articles about researchers warning that ot may be a mistake to synthesize the entire covid spike protein for the vaccination, because there is a risk of the body developing immunity to the spike protein in such a way, that an endogenous protein is also detected, which then leads to an auto-immune disease.
This is one paper that I found that talks about what I heard back then.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35028901/
Moreover, the spike protein appears to share antigenic epitopes with human molecular chaperons resulting in autoimmunity and can activate toll-like receptors (TLRs), leading to release of inflammatory cytokines.
But apart from that, I only brought up covid to underline that the long-covid symptoms are the prime example anti-vaxxers point to when defending their decision not to vaccinate. And those long-covid symptoms are likely triggered by an auto-immune disease, which is likely triggered because of malformed covid-detection proteins that erroneously flag endogenous proteins as malicious as well.
So my point is, if the long-covid symptons are responsible for pushing anti-vax into the mainstream, then an auto-immune disease triggered by mirror-pathogens will break humanity.
It’s ok to just not like the idea of the covid immunizations. Making stuff up to try to justify your belief, however…
Reading their comment carefully, I don’t think that’s what they’re saying at all. They’re not advocating against immunization, arguing that it’s bad to inject synthetic substances, nor justifying their belief but rather guessing how the biology stuff works under the hood.
I don’t see how what you wrote about spike protein and autoimmunity relates at all to mirror life. But I could be missing something.
Would prions fall under this category?
no
the point of prions is that there’s a naturally occurring protein in metastable state, and when contacted by a protein in more stable state it can transition to that more stable state. this way it’s infective without being alive. there’s nothing like this in nature, let alone commonly occurring
Anyone feeling freaked out by this doesn’t have anything to worry about. There’s nothing you and I can do to stop the research. Go on and enjoy your life.
Not with that attitude.
Good point.
Don’t enjoy your life. Fuck it.
The thing about that is if all this is for is research then I could have some hope that they’d actually stop.
If someone thinks there’s profit to be made and that’s what is driving the research then it’s never going to stop unless they go bankrupt or it proves to be worthless… What happens to the world at large doesn’t matter one bit to people chasing profit :(
Right. That’s what i said.
So just enjoy what you have. Smile, chin up, tell your family and friends you love them. Don’t stress over something you can’t control.
Well that depends on much you want the media and the internet to analyse your favourite Pokémon or your opinion on the merits of the Lorax vis-a-vis the Unabomber Manifesto.
I am NOT a religious man but I’m a strong believer that we are so eager to play God we are forgetting to ask the important questions around if we should.
Personally speaking I think we need to pause on things like this, or AI as another example. We have proven repeatedly we lack the maturity as a species for what we ar learning.
That said, you can’t put everything back in Pandora’s box so for everyone reading this sharing my concern, YOLO and cover your head and wait for the worst.
Or do it offworld at least, wired up to a dead man’s switch connected to like…a nuke. Nobody infected can leave, and any localized research or pathogens are crisped and blown apart.
Like, seriously, we only have this one green planet for potentially hundreds of light-years around us, which even at the speed of light would take us centuries to reach another earth-like world. We really cannot afford to damage this lifeboat in a vast sea of barren, rocky islands devoid of life, water, or food.
Even climate change is mind boggling to think about, when you realize there’s no alternatives anywhere even close. Even with incredibly optimistic technology breakthroughs, we are still centuries away from travelling outside this solar system and making it to the next closest star system (light-years away).
I think the only way to grow past our immaturity is to break out of our boundaries as human. I’d rather try than stagnate with all our flaws into extinction.
AI is one of those things that’s stupidly overblown. The true downsides to AI are it’s uses in spreading misinformation and it’s enormous environmental impact. When companies are buying nuclear plants for enough electricity, the whole thing has gone off the rails. There are other downsides but those two are the largeat to me. In short though, we’ve nothing like true AI anyways so playing god is a stretch.
Edit: tbf I do understand your point and find it valid.
It’s like that old saying … Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
It’s not that old, I remember when the film came out.
The saying is old, not the film.
And again, like a child, we lack the maturity as a species to understand that.
But is it not our curiosity that defines us? What separates us from machines, outside of needing to sleep, if we don’t have our curiosity, our passion for the unknown? It’s not like we can only have a little curiosity, curious enough to try a new meal but not to work towards breakthroughs that might unlock ways of bettering our lives.
How else would we have gotten all of our vaccines without people “playing god”? I think while the garbage AI is a bit scary, it’s not the AI part that terrifies me, it’s the coldness “the economy” has towards people’s livelihoods, otherwise AI is nothing special in pushing forward or downfall as a society, it’s just highlighting something that was always there, a class conflict
Ahh yes, man made horrors beyond our comprehension
Proteins and DNA and their mirrored counterparts behave like the Tetris L and ⅃ blocks, basically the same but you cannot rotate them to fit in a hole meant for the other. Fitting in holes is, somewhat literally, how most processes of life work on the sub-cellular level.
Like the immune system. And if an experimental microbe from mirrored DNA doesn’t fit in the holes your immune system uses to identify things, because all the proteins curve the wrong way, there’s no telling how it behaves, even if the unmirrored version is one of the most studied organisms. And it’s not just your immune system, it’s every living things’ one. And 1 microbe alone is a potential pandemic.
I am no expert, but I hope the horror is comprehensible now. If not, I imagine minuteEarth’s video on mirrored molecules is basically the same reasoning here, with the caveat that mirrored DNA tends to make more of itself.
The incomprehensible part was that we don’t know how bad things can get if this stuff got out into the wild. I got the chiral parts lol thanks for the further explanation
Well, at least I finally understand how Death Stranding began.
I can comprehend this one perfectly, actually.
I get the fear but what about those of us that want a Symbiote-suit?
What, another one? Look we’re already several kinds of risk to all life on earth - it’s way too late to get hung up on it just because another one was added to the pile. I mean it’s not like genuine but dangerous research won’t exploited by the same rich bastards already exploiting all the rest of mankind’s genuine but deadly research. Throwing another one on the bonfire won’t change it.
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer
