‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research
‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research
Experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could put humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections
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.
And here I thought my late 2024 anxiety level was maxed out already.
It gets worse. They are also working on mirror physics, where they launch orbiting observatories made of antimatter. What could possibly go wrong.
Is this how we unwittingly start a new simulation within this simulation?
lol don't worry about it, you'll be long dead from global warming by the time it's developed
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.
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.
Not with that attitude.
Good point.
Don't enjoy your life. Fuck it.
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.
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.
Processes 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.
I get the fear but what about those of us that want a Symbiote-suit?
I can comprehend this one perfectly, actually.
It really is more of a fear of the unknowable than a horror beyond comprehension, isn't it?
Sure. Why not. Add it to the pile.
Evil microbes with little goatees..
This was immediately my thought haha
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.
"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
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 are 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.
Edit - the biggest threat to humanity is our unyielding curiosity.
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.
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.
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).
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
This seems like something that really is a minimal risk. Pathogens are pathogens because they are able to make use of our bodies as raw materials to reproduce. Unless they are able to make use of both enantiomers in their biology, there's little benefit to dedicating resources to colonizing us.
Probably a bigger concern would be outcompeting and displacing organisms lower on the food chain.
If mirrored microbes require mirrored antibodies to be killed that is something no living thing on earth has the ability to create.
Absolutely. Conversely, if mirrored microbes aren't able to make use of building materials in hosts that are mirrors to them, pathogenicity makes little biological sense (microbes don't make us sick out of spite). Now, if they could, that would be a problem. Even if not, they could fatally disrupt the gut microbiome.
The scope of what I suspect to be the greater danger, I've, perhaps understated. Suppose mirror bacteria "escape" and are able to thrive in the surrounding environment. As you note, known life has not evolved to be able to defend against it. This introduces the possibility of the artificial bacteria displacing the natural ones. Since the biosphere involves more complex organisms feeding on the smaller ones, it is plausible that the entire food web could be disrupted, leading to extinction of extant complex life, unless adaptation occurs quick enough.
I don't think that's how it works. This would just double the amount of microbes that can possibly exist in the world. Your immune system would still be good, but it would double the number of fronts in the proverbial war.
What?
Fire, alcohol, bleach, etc. Would all still disinfect.
Immune systems would still work. They detect anything "foreign". Immune system reacts to a metal splinter just like it would for wood or a parasite.
Do you have credentials in this field, or are you just kind of guessing? Because, no offense, but I'm skeptical of random people on internet forums contradicting literal scientists.
Good point, though I find the part of the commentary relevant:
Although we were initially skeptical that mirror bacteria could pose major risks, we have become deeply concerned. We were uncertain about the feasibility of synthesizing mirror bacteria but have concluded that technological progress will likely make this possible. We were uncertain about the consequences of mirror bacterial infection in humans and animals, but a close examination of existing studies led us to conclude that infections could be severe. Unlike previous discussions of mirror life, we also realized that generalist heterotroph mirror bacteria might find a range of nutrients in animal hosts and the environment and thus would not be intrinsically biocontained
Unlike previous discussions of mirror life, we also realized that generalist heterotroph mirror bacteria might find a range of nutrients in animal hosts and the environment and thus would not be intrinsically biocontained
That is basically my suspicion, from my knowledge at this time. Pathogenicity as a danger seems questionable based upon how incompatible known life is with the opposite enantiomers of its basic building blocks (though, if artificial "mirror" bacteria were able to develop enzymes to change the chirality of the proteins, etc, it would probably be bad).
Going on that energy-intensive chemistry being tricky to accomplish, it is far more likely that generalists could displace extant microorganisms that may be unable to use their evolved defenses effectively. This could result in cascading food web disruptions until either extant life adapts, or complex organisms go extinct through starvation.
And your background in biology is..?
You read what they wrote and became sceptical of their credentials? I mean, it's healthy to be cautiously sceptical of anything you read/hear to an extent. But to immediately and without any further discussion, call them out in a patronising and condescending way is wild.
It makes me want to know if you have a background in biology. Since you so readily dispute someone else's. Someone who, at least on the surface, seems to know what they are talking about.
In fact, why do you give so much credit to the legitimacy of the article and its writer, there might be a "38 strong group" of nobel laureates and experts warning about this, but the writer of the article adds the spin. The writer decides how to portray the warnings and their urgency. They might be overselling this. And since there is little to no citation in the article, i am more inclined to question the articles' legitimacy before i query this poster....
Unless they are able to make use of both enantiomers in their biology
I wouldn't expect that sentence from someone without a background in biology for many, many reasons.
After browsing facebook for one hour I also got to the conclusion that all those people publishing in Science are lying. /s
It's cool, America has RFK Jr. So...
...it's not cool, actually
Maybe someone should build 50 underground silos.
Make sure you bring along a spare water chip.
Oh, great... Certainly no laboratory in some Les amicable country will continue this research to try to take a stab at fame....
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.
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
Oh, new Rimworld
war crimemod idea!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.
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 don't see how what you wrote about spike protein and autoimmunity relates at all to mirror life. But I could be missing something.
Despite there being no evidence 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 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.htmlSorry 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...
Thank you for that explanation and extra source.