'In December 2024, 38 scientists, including several synthetic biology researchers and two Nobel laureates, warned that the creation of mirror-image life could cause "unprecedented and irreversible harm" to human health and ecosystems worldwide. The reversed structure of mirror-image bacteria could allow them to evade many mechanisms critical for immunity and predation that have evolved to recognize natural-chirality structures. As a result, mirror-image bacteria could potentially escape immune defenses and invade natural ecosystems, leading to "pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans."'
You don't need a mirror image organism to cause great harm. An engineered prion could also be devastating.
I don't think preons are technically mirror molecules, but it's close enough from a risk perspective. If rogue AI were to do us in through bioengineering, it might be by creating a novel prion.
The primary proposed benefit of creating mirror-image organisms is as a means to mass-produce mirror-image forms of molecules that are produced by normal life. Mirror-image molecules have been studied for several decades and may offer a range of potential applications. There is broad agreement among scientists that it is important to distinguish between mirror-image molecules and whole mirror-image organisms. Some scientists argue that chemical synthesis methods are sufficient for creating mirror-image molecules without posing the potentially catastrophic risks of mirror-image organisms.
Potential applications of mirror-image molecules include:
Enantiopure drugs: Some pharmaceuticals show different activity depending on enantiomeric form.
L-ribonucleic acid aptamers: Artificial oligonucleotides that are constructed from the mirror-image versions of their natural forms. L-RNA aptamers are highly resistant to degradation by nucleases and are currently being tested in clinical trials.
L-glucose, enantiomer of standard glucose: Tests showed that it tastes likes standard sugar, but is not metabolized the same way. However, it was never marketed due to excessive manufacturing costs. More recent research allows cheap production with high yields; however the authors state that it is not usable as a sweetener due to laxative effects.
I had read somewhere that it could allow the creation of cures that would not trigger the immune system, since they would use chirality to hide, so to speak.
As a diabetic, I would love "mirror wheat" which behaves like normal wheat (ie can make breads, etc) but has zero carbs/calories because the body can't digest it. Mirror glucose would be nice too, though allulose is already a pretty close stand in for mirror glucose.
Nature can't and doesn't try everything. It also potentially discards old things.
If both sided life was prevalent early on, and one outcompeted the other, it may have gone extinct a billion years back. New life would have some difficulty evolving in an environment where existing life is well established.
I really doubt a "mirror life" bacteria would be "hidden" from the immune system. Antibodies should have enough search space to be able to detect and neutralise such bacteria?
The adaptive immune system is highly capable and uses a range of techniques to identify and eliminate molecules it has no prior experience with.
In one example, the mirror molecules would likely cause some sort of localized inflammation or other lesion, and then the immune system would be attracted to the area, generating trillions of combinations of randomized protein sequences. If within that trillion there is just 1 antibody that can bind to the mirror life, the immune system will duplicate that molecule many times, and they will bind to the mirror molecules, recruit other proteins that will isolate and degrade them, and then remove them from the body.
Due to the complexity of protein structures, antibodies can bind to mirror molecules.
Every time I show a computer scientist this system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination they remark, "Wait, nature uses self-modifying code? It generates trillions of random combinations, shuffles them around, finding the best ones, and then amplifies them? You know that sort of sounds like this CS technique called genetic algorithms" at which point you just stare at them until the exclamation point above their head goes "BINGO"
"A sufficiently stereochemically alien pathogen could, in principle, place essentially all of its important antigenic determinants outside the effective recognition repertoire of a conventional adaptive immune system."
With perfect knowledge of the immune system and the capability to create the pathogens of our dreams it would most likely be possible to create this pathogen of our dreams.
Making an entire self replicating mirror organism that would both have this property of "being invisible to the specific immune system" and AND being an effective pathogen is far from a solved problem though. It's further away as useful quantum computing!
We don't even have self replicating mirror cells, just some synthetic Frankensteins.
I find it really hard to believe that you can make a whole organism that doesn't have any molecules that can be targeted by an antibody. And if you can do that then why go through mirror life anyway?
A reasonable argument is that mirror proteins will evade the usual degradation+antigen presentation pipeline and this will make efficient adaptive response more difficult, or that the innate immune reaction will not be enough to recruit adaptive response. But surely it's not impossible. And if we ever get to this point I'm very optimistic that we would have a good way to vaccinate against this.
> I find it really hard to believe that you can make a whole organism that doesn't have any molecules that can be targeted by an antibody.
We just don't know yet, but I want to believe because I think it's exciting. Protease failure, transport machinery failure, MHC binding failure, they are all stereospecific after all... So it's possible.
> And if you can do that then why go through mirror life anyway?
Because our body can produce antibodies against all "classical" forms of life. It's probably impossible to produce classical pathogens that are fully invisible to the immune system. That's the whole point and danger of mirror life in the context of pathogen creation. Plenty of classical pathogens were our antibodies (usually) don't help already exist though: HIV for example, where only very few people are lucky enough to be elite neutralizers. If we wanted to do biological warfare, it would probably easier to enhance those viruses.
> And if we ever get to this point I'm very optimistic that we would have a good way to vaccinate against this.
I am not so sure about this, if the bodies molecular machinery is unable to produce antigens for those pathogens, no classical or mrna vaccine is gonna trick the body into producing them, it's just technically impossible. You'd need to "update" the whole immune system to be able to manufacture the mirror antibodies and from that we are an eternity away. The only remotely feasible cure in such a world would be through infecting the body with another mirror-pathogen that produces mirror-antibodies or directly injecting mirror-antibodies...
Most of the key molecules of life are chiral, existing in one of two mirror-image structures; life uses only one. Receptors and enzymes using one cannot generally recognize the other. Most 'wrong-handed' chiral chemicals are like having a key cut in a mirror image where the index slot and the pins are cut on the wrong side; it won't even fit in the lock.
It could plausibly turn out there is so little ability for the different chiral forms to interact that 'mirror life' would not be a threat. It could also turn out to the extent they could interact, regular life could also detect and evolve how to counteract the novel pathogens in time.
And even if the interaction is low so they aren't highly infectious, the lack of ability to recognize the 'mirror-life' means regular life cannot attack it so mirror life grows unchecked and consumes resources needed for all life.
But there are so many unknowns, and so many unknown unknowns, and such absolutely catastrophic consequences for life on earth, that relying on ALL of those possible success modes working is stupidity beyond insanity.
This is probably the biggest example of "just because you can does not mean you should".
It's nowhere close to being possible. To do anything related to life you need to have a lot of complex molecules. When you do things with normal life you can have genetically modified organisms that will produce whatever substance you need in whatever amount you need.
To get mirror substances you need to create them chemically which is PITA even if possible.
This sort of thing highlights the most dangerous thing about a high-tech society: people will do ANYTHING to cure a disease they or their loved ones have, even if it means an existential risk that we often have the ability of instantiating.
Obviously not worth it, but to the person who themselves face an existential risk, the level of absurd justification from the instinct to survive will always trump sanity.
Or to make a couple of bucks. Reading that mirror-image sugars could work as calorie-free sweeteners feels like foreshadowing for the end of the world.
Well, some of them can not be absorbed by your guts, so the bacterias in your guts make a huge party and you feel bad, but they don't create scary versions of the bacterias.
The article about (another) the end of the world is behind a paywall, the tweet about it is behind a login screen - guess I'll find out when it happens!
Can we please stop trying to kill everyone for like 5 seconds? Mirror life would probably be the fastest, most uncontrollable, path to the extinction of every complex organism on earth, ourselves included. If there is a worse idea than building Roko's Basilisk, it is building mirror life.
How do we actually know that nature hasn't already done this? There don't seem to be any sustained searches for existing "mirror life" to found in the wild.
- bacterial populations are being regulated by bacteriophages (viruses) or predators. They have spent millions of years evolving to hunt standard chiral life and wouldn't be physically able to digest or hunt mirror bacteria.
- the same is true of our immune system. Our pattern-recognition receptors only work for non-mirror molecules and wouldn't recognize a reversed molecular fingerprint. You may be able to engineer antibiotics and phages, but a vaccine would require a creative approach.
- the claim "yes but mirror bacteria would starve since they wouldn't find mirror food to eat in nature or in our bodies" doesn't hold up, because there are enough achiral (non-handed) nutrients in the soil, our blood and our gut that mirror bacteria could eat.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 61.8 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life#Potential_ri...
'In December 2024, 38 scientists, including several synthetic biology researchers and two Nobel laureates, warned that the creation of mirror-image life could cause "unprecedented and irreversible harm" to human health and ecosystems worldwide. The reversed structure of mirror-image bacteria could allow them to evade many mechanisms critical for immunity and predation that have evolved to recognize natural-chirality structures. As a result, mirror-image bacteria could potentially escape immune defenses and invade natural ecosystems, leading to "pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans."'
I don't think preons are technically mirror molecules, but it's close enough from a risk perspective. If rogue AI were to do us in through bioengineering, it might be by creating a novel prion.
Potential applications of mirror-image molecules include:
Enantiopure drugs: Some pharmaceuticals show different activity depending on enantiomeric form.
L-ribonucleic acid aptamers: Artificial oligonucleotides that are constructed from the mirror-image versions of their natural forms. L-RNA aptamers are highly resistant to degradation by nucleases and are currently being tested in clinical trials.
L-glucose, enantiomer of standard glucose: Tests showed that it tastes likes standard sugar, but is not metabolized the same way. However, it was never marketed due to excessive manufacturing costs. More recent research allows cheap production with high yields; however the authors state that it is not usable as a sweetener due to laxative effects.
[From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life]
If both sided life was prevalent early on, and one outcompeted the other, it may have gone extinct a billion years back. New life would have some difficulty evolving in an environment where existing life is well established.
more seriously: how would it be able search for something it has no experience seeing at all
In one example, the mirror molecules would likely cause some sort of localized inflammation or other lesion, and then the immune system would be attracted to the area, generating trillions of combinations of randomized protein sequences. If within that trillion there is just 1 antibody that can bind to the mirror life, the immune system will duplicate that molecule many times, and they will bind to the mirror molecules, recruit other proteins that will isolate and degrade them, and then remove them from the body.
Due to the complexity of protein structures, antibodies can bind to mirror molecules.
Every time I show a computer scientist this system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination they remark, "Wait, nature uses self-modifying code? It generates trillions of random combinations, shuffles them around, finding the best ones, and then amplifies them? You know that sort of sounds like this CS technique called genetic algorithms" at which point you just stare at them until the exclamation point above their head goes "BINGO"
With perfect knowledge of the immune system and the capability to create the pathogens of our dreams it would most likely be possible to create this pathogen of our dreams.
Making an entire self replicating mirror organism that would both have this property of "being invisible to the specific immune system" and AND being an effective pathogen is far from a solved problem though. It's further away as useful quantum computing!
We don't even have self replicating mirror cells, just some synthetic Frankensteins.
A reasonable argument is that mirror proteins will evade the usual degradation+antigen presentation pipeline and this will make efficient adaptive response more difficult, or that the innate immune reaction will not be enough to recruit adaptive response. But surely it's not impossible. And if we ever get to this point I'm very optimistic that we would have a good way to vaccinate against this.
We just don't know yet, but I want to believe because I think it's exciting. Protease failure, transport machinery failure, MHC binding failure, they are all stereospecific after all... So it's possible.
> And if you can do that then why go through mirror life anyway?
Because our body can produce antibodies against all "classical" forms of life. It's probably impossible to produce classical pathogens that are fully invisible to the immune system. That's the whole point and danger of mirror life in the context of pathogen creation. Plenty of classical pathogens were our antibodies (usually) don't help already exist though: HIV for example, where only very few people are lucky enough to be elite neutralizers. If we wanted to do biological warfare, it would probably easier to enhance those viruses.
> And if we ever get to this point I'm very optimistic that we would have a good way to vaccinate against this.
I am not so sure about this, if the bodies molecular machinery is unable to produce antigens for those pathogens, no classical or mrna vaccine is gonna trick the body into producing them, it's just technically impossible. You'd need to "update" the whole immune system to be able to manufacture the mirror antibodies and from that we are an eternity away. The only remotely feasible cure in such a world would be through infecting the body with another mirror-pathogen that produces mirror-antibodies or directly injecting mirror-antibodies...
Most of the key molecules of life are chiral, existing in one of two mirror-image structures; life uses only one. Receptors and enzymes using one cannot generally recognize the other. Most 'wrong-handed' chiral chemicals are like having a key cut in a mirror image where the index slot and the pins are cut on the wrong side; it won't even fit in the lock.
It could plausibly turn out there is so little ability for the different chiral forms to interact that 'mirror life' would not be a threat. It could also turn out to the extent they could interact, regular life could also detect and evolve how to counteract the novel pathogens in time.
And even if the interaction is low so they aren't highly infectious, the lack of ability to recognize the 'mirror-life' means regular life cannot attack it so mirror life grows unchecked and consumes resources needed for all life.
But there are so many unknowns, and so many unknown unknowns, and such absolutely catastrophic consequences for life on earth, that relying on ALL of those possible success modes working is stupidity beyond insanity.
This is probably the biggest example of "just because you can does not mean you should".
To get mirror substances you need to create them chemically which is PITA even if possible.
- "Starfish"
- "Maelstrom"
- "βehemoth"
Obviously not worth it, but to the person who themselves face an existential risk, the level of absurd justification from the instinct to survive will always trump sanity.
Or to make a couple of bucks. Reading that mirror-image sugars could work as calorie-free sweeteners feels like foreshadowing for the end of the world.
Well, some of them can not be absorbed by your guts, so the bacterias in your guts make a huge party and you feel bad, but they don't create scary versions of the bacterias.
In my world, that'd be illegal.
How do we solve the housing crisis?
- bacterial populations are being regulated by bacteriophages (viruses) or predators. They have spent millions of years evolving to hunt standard chiral life and wouldn't be physically able to digest or hunt mirror bacteria.
- the same is true of our immune system. Our pattern-recognition receptors only work for non-mirror molecules and wouldn't recognize a reversed molecular fingerprint. You may be able to engineer antibiotics and phages, but a vaccine would require a creative approach.
- the claim "yes but mirror bacteria would starve since they wouldn't find mirror food to eat in nature or in our bodies" doesn't hold up, because there are enough achiral (non-handed) nutrients in the soil, our blood and our gut that mirror bacteria could eat.