It may soon be possible to create "mirror life"
economist.com58 points by amai 2 days ago
58 points by amai 2 days ago
Finally, we built a mirror bacteria from the famous "Don't create a mirror bacteria" paper.
Or maybe we could focus on something not world ending for once?
What do you do for work? I'm sure we can figure out how it also contributes to ending the world, one way or another :)
Challenge accepted.
I worked for this company that did telephone service for the hard of hearing. It was a phone that could go very loud. It also captioned the far end of the phone call, in case the user couldn't pick out all the words, even with the high volume.
I await your world-ending scenario for that tech and/or company.
Easy, Douglas Adams already documented the fate of the Golgafrincham: entirely wiped out by a virulent, fatal disease caught from an unsanitized telephone!
You thought you were enabling communication(already dangerous as per the babel fish!) but you were ensuring the means of transmission!
But seriously though, sounds like a fun job where the byproduct of your work improved the experiences and access of people, and thats pretty great.
Funnily enough, the disease only hit them so hard, because all the smart people (engineers etc.) on Golgafrincham got together and thought "Hey, let's get rid of all the unimportant jobs like 'telephone sanitisers'!"
It would be really ironic if we were similarly destroying institutional knowledge by optimizing away lots of "unimportant" roles, wouldn't it?
Captioning? If the company used novel techniques you contributed to the surveillance state, you're welcome
> Challenge accepted.
Ironically, this is the type of mindset of scientists that do this type of dangerous research. Just to see if it’s possible, with no concern of ethics ever bothering them.
The second order effect is obvious. There's some hard of hearing person working on a nefarious device using a phone successfully only because of your dastardly work. How you can sleep at night is beyond my ability to comprehend.
If any life destroys all life, it will be humans destroying all life. So any human promoting act is a contribution to the destruction of all life.
Dolphins are advanced enough, we should let them take it from here.
The next hard of hearing terrorist will use this tech to communicate in otherwise inaccessible channels to gain nuclear capability. Or a nation state actor will abuse it to create such circumstances that they will. Or they will use it as a justification for why they need to protect against the hard of hearing and therefore need funding to develop some weapon.
And in all cases your salary will be taxed to fund weapons and warfare no matter what work you're doing.
Your fingers alone can kill. Everything is a weapon. Don't ignore that fact. Seek to empower the evil doer that is doing the least evil. Do gooders don't run for office.
There's a series of books from Petter Watts that give plenty of good reasons why this might not be the best idea:
- "Starfish"
- "Maelstrom"
- "βehemoth"
>βehemoth
How I read that? Like Ssehemoth or like Behemoth?
I'm glad you asked! Obviously you have to check the code table and you can see that's a Greek beta, not German Eszett. \s
In [1]: ord("β")
Out[1]: 946
In [2]: ord("ß")
Out[2]: 223Come on now. I would swear both characters are the same. I didn't know that the German one wasn't a Greek beta.
The little tail is the distinction
It's not, actually. The actual difference is that beta is a form of B, while Eszett is two letters s (a long one and a short one) joined together and drawn with a single stroke. Alternatively, a letter s and a letter z (hence the name Eszett).
You gave the history of it
But the context of the question is how a system like a human can make a visual distinction quickly via a characteristic
The characteristic I gave was the little tail which is independent of knowing the derivative of how it got its tail
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.
On why we shouldn't:
- 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.
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!
In my world, that'd be illegal.
Dear AI,
How do we solve the housing crisis?
Hey, finally a world-ending catastrophe that's actually plausible to worry about!
This has the potential to destroy all life.
I'm sure nature has already tried these "mirror" forms, and for efficiency/practicality reasons, discarded them.
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.
Hyperbole aside, has the risk of this been truly studied?
All I hear is "there's no danger" or "OMG this will kill us all" and in neither case is any reason given.
Risks have been proposed. Consequences can range from nearly nothing up to world ending. OTOH there is zero upside. Obviously mirror life should be possible but there is no upside in actually making it other than to stroke someone's ego.
I would propose the following experiment: build mirror life on board a space capsule that has been sent beyond Earth orbit into a solar orbital trajectory. A large expendable Starship or Orion capsule could have enough interior volume to hold everything needed. Do it remotely by robotic control.
Perform a series of primary safety experiments on board, determining whether mirror life truly does evade immune systems, predation, decomposition, or other biological check mechanisms.
If the safety experiment results are alarming, the spacecraft is not just far past Earth but has a powerful explosive on board and can be detonated in deep space. Any living matter scattered by the explosion would be destroyed by solar and cosmic rays, and it's not coming back to Earth anyway.
A maybe cheaper but slightly less intensively confined solution would be to do it deep underground with a tactical nuke on hand to turn the results into radioactive ash encased in bedrock if the results are alarming.
I think we should do this, since it's obvious that the technology to create mirror life exists. If it is existentially dangerous we should find out under highly isolated conditions. If it's not we can breathe a sigh of relief, and if it is we can take appropriate regulatory action before someone oops-es it.
It is extremely dangerous and we don't need studies to know this. Consider a bacteria which your immune system cannot see. Such a thing would kill you very very quickly. Now, consider that our immune systems are composed of molecules of the normal chirality. They would be completely unable to recognize the molecules mirror life would use.
Also our immune system will be (for good reasons) killing off anything else it encounters, which means hopes like "I'm sure it'll get out-competed by $regular_bacteria in the water" are foolish.
Imagine a mirror-bacteria that does nothing directly against your cells, and seems benign at first glance... but it will slowly grow in your bloodstream and simply thicken it until your heart fails. Everyone in the world forever on artificial dialysis would not be survivable.
The immune system attacks everything that is weird, it does not check that it is currently not misbehaving.
One of the major concerns about "mirror life" is that it is, in a particular way, so extremely weird that normal processes don't apply.
Bacteria in your body doesn't need to be entirely stealthy or entirely invulnerable or entirely toxic to kill you. Just "enough". Jellified-blood with inflammation would still be fatal.
Yes, as a matter of fact it has been studied. For instance:
1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158?referrer...
2. https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/mirror-life-experiment-d...
The detailed thinking has been published in high-ranking journals like Science. And even if the risk is relatively small, isn't that already a good enough reason not to cross this border. Do we have to fucking discover everything? Don't we have enough already?
The craziness of some people who want to know everything is beyond my comprehension.
>Do we have to fucking discover everything? Don't we have enough already?
Isn't that the point of science? To discover things? I don't think we know enough already.
Now should we pursue this specific dangerous research direction? Probably not. But I don't think broad statements like "we have enough already" are warranted.
Trillions of dollars of investment in this incoming, probably. Can't make a profit without breaking a few planets, you know how it is.
Start with the primary document, not the news cycle.
Adamala et al., "Confronting risks of mirror life", Science, 12 Dec 2024 (doi 10.1126/science.ads9158). Thirty-eight co-authors, two of them Nobel laureates, several of whom had been working toward mirror cells. The argument is narrower than the headline: chirality is load-bearing in the systems that keep bacteria in check. Immune recognition, phage infection and microbial predation all key off molecular handedness, so a mirror bacterium plausibly slips through a lot of those filters while competing for the same nutrients as ordinary bacteria. The usual backstops (phages, predators, most antibiotics) are themselves handed, so they do not obviously cover it either.
That is a strong ask for a "this might be bad" paper: they say mirror bacteria should not be created, while explicitly keeping mirror molecules (L-RNA aptamers, mirror-image drugs) in bounds, because those are made by chemistry and are a different question.
It has moved since. 96 biotech researchers signed a statement agreeing with the conclusion. The first international meeting on mirror life largely agreed it should not be built. Germany's ZKBS said mirror-molecule work should continue but mirror bacteria warrant a broad scientific and societal debate. UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee recommended a precautionary global moratorium.
The honest caveat: there is a live disagreement, not a consensus. Some researchers argue the risk is still theoretical and that bans are premature (Nature, Sept 2025). And the feasibility is genuinely decades off. But "not soon" and "not studied" are different claims, and the risk case has been written down in detail by the people who wanted the technology to exist.
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.
"people will do ANYTHING to cure a disease"
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.
Why are you worried? They have been studied for decades and cause no problem https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/2017/05/24/d-and-l-su...
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.
About L-Glucose: according to Wikipedia, "the authors state that it is not usable as a sweetener due to laxative effects."
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.
I highly recommend watching an interview with a person that achieved best results so far with creating artificial normal (for some definitions of normal) almost life from the grounds up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4WywVQfIV4
There is a section of whether this kind of work enables creation mirror life as well.
So what bsl is mirror life supposed to be locked up in?
Laboratory leaks have occurred more than once.
The "Potential Risks" section of the wiki is a bit thin on the mechanisms of the danger.
https://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."'
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.
So that's two things we shouldn't be releasing into the world.
Unfortunately, there are several prion diseases already in existence: scrapie in sheep, BSE in cows, Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, and both Kuru and Crutzfeld-Jacob in humans.
Scrapie is incredibly durable in the environment; the prion toxins can remain transmissible in the soil for a decade, causing disease years after it was shed by its previous host.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...
Everybody is worrying about the AI torment nexus, meanwhile, we're grinding up cows (and sheep) and feeding those bits to cows and then people eat the cows and go crazy.
Actually, scrapie itself is conjectured to trigger BSE.
"Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal that contained either the remains of cattle who spontaneously developed the disease or scrapie-infected sheep products...
"The British Government enquiry took the view that the cause was not scrapie, as had originally been postulated, but was some event in the 1970s that could not be identified."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
what exactly would we usefully get from doing it?
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.
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.
Sounds like a mix of fiber and gluten to get bread-like structure? But then again, if it doesn't deliver carbs, what would be the point?
Same point as zero sugar sodas... Enjoyment of the flavor even though it provides no nutrition or energy
It would be very helpful for keto diet stuff too, since breads are basically most of the carbs and calories you eat in a lot of meals
I do worry that much mass not being digested would be trouble for you though.
We already make use of "mirror" molecules; the idea is that mirror organisms could help efficiently create these for us (like how we can use yeast and fungi etc to create various chemicals).
Of course there is also the whole potential apocalypse scenario
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.
Yes, we will work on life forms undetectable to the immune system. For uh, checks notes cures. Disregard the fact that the imperial military runs our society.
Stuff our immune system doesn't recognize is potentially useful for things like vaccine delivery. But it's also useful for a potential pathogen.
I don't like the idea of creating microorganisms our immune systems can't recognize.
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.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should"
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?
well, you are the expert!
more seriously: how would it be able search for something it has no experience seeing at all
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"
"Should" is not the same as "Is/Does".
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".
"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.
What's the source of that first quote? AI searching is giving me a bunch of false positives.
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...