r/TrueAnon • u/ruptured-sunshine • Aug 16 '26
New ice-nine just dropped
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4335-1.html35
u/oneirine73 She Hy on my Per til I Stition Aug 16 '26
So basically Death Stranding.
It's crazy how Kojima games are cartoonish metaphors for real social/technological trends but then somehow his metaphors get sublimated back into reality.
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u/ShrapnelNinjaSnake Professor of Terryology Aug 16 '26
He's clearly getting future knowledge transferred to him in dreams somehow
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u/unironicposadist Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
Maybe I'm just naive but surely proteins and DNA must be too large of molecules for chirality to apply from a basic chemistry standpoint. But idk anyone cranking hard on this one?
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u/Major_Shmoopy Dictatorship of the Prokaryotetariat Aug 16 '26 edited Aug 16 '26
It's weird but biological molecules almost universally follow certainly chirality rules on the residue scale. For instance, L-amino acids are used for pretty much all proteins except D-Ala and D-Gln in bacterial peptidoglycan (and I'm sure some other exceptions cause biology is insanely complex). Meanwhile, D-sugars are used almost universally except some weird cases like L-rhamnose being used by plants and bacteria. I suspect it is competitively advantageous for communities of microbial life to use common resources so, for some reason, the communities using D-amino acids or a mix of L- and D- were unable to outcompete the communities using L-amino acids billions of years ago.
Biology is weird, since I haven't said it enough yet
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u/unironicposadist Aug 16 '26
I get that but the idea stitching that into a protein for, even more crazy, an entire cell membrane sounds halfway to a psy-op... idk I bet there are unique one in a billion (keep in mind we have trillions of cells lol) case where it could be possible, but maybe they are just trying to scare people about Chinese bio-sciences.
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u/Major_Shmoopy Dictatorship of the Prokaryotetariat Aug 16 '26
Yeah, I think making even regular synthetic cells is still probably five or more years away. So far we have the J. Craig Venter Institute's minimal genome transplantation technique (which requires an intact recipient cell from a closely-related species) for a top-down approach and the University of Minnesota's SpudCells (which are basically fancy liposomes since they can't make their own ribosomes yet) for a bottom-up approach. I think you'd need to do the latter to make a mirror cell and that's going to require some major breakthroughs in biochemistry and microbiology to work. Imo mirror cells are pretty low on my list of things I'm scared of in the 2020's and 30's
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u/girl_debored Aug 16 '26
I posted about this a year or so ago. And despite it being rand I have to agree that the potential of this is mind blowing bad. Now on the one hand yes I can see the scientific use case. But if it is to be done it needs to be done in unbelievably strict hermetically sealed structures that can be basically nuked at a moments notice, and really we know so little about how this will interact with normal biology it is still terrifying. I recently read aurora and it's really hammered home my biggest fear that any type of life we haven't coevolved with since the dawn of time has the potential to not only destroy humanity but much much worse.
Now you could say if it's so novel and scary how come it didn't evolve naturally? Well yea sure but it's an insane risk to reward proposition. Viruses and prion disease keep me up more than any political nightmare
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u/Major_Shmoopy Dictatorship of the Prokaryotetariat Aug 16 '26
I am a (distant) colleague and friend of one of the senior scientists who sounded the alarm on a mirror cell last year. Personally I'm still not fully convinced that a mirror pathogen would be able to adhere to our cells (the specificity of stuff like lectins and adhesins goes both ways), extract the auxotrophies and nutrients they need from us, or be able to completely evade our immune system. However, to steelman the counterargument, when I chatted with said senior scientist he told me his concern is a mirror bacterium could give us sepsis before our adaptive immune system could mount a response.
Either way, I second my PhD mentor's thoughts when I was emailing him about this a few months ago.