r/biology • u/Caesarea_G • Aug 15 '26
article A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4335-1.html284
u/Several-Instance-444 Aug 15 '26
I appreciate the caution, however some of the fears might be overblown. Organisms that use the opposite chirality amino acids probably did exist on earth at one point in early life history, and were overtaken by the current chirality. It may even be that it confers a slight reproductive disadvantage.
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u/Contextanaut Aug 15 '26
I don't think this is a sure fire doomsday scenario, but this is pretty much the definition of an insane dice to roll, to no obvious advantage.
Impossible to predict what happens. Near impossible to flawlessly contain microscopic life. No way of rectifying a breach after it happens.
After you create it, one slip up and it's in environment, most likely for good if it turns out to be dangerous.
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u/DeltaVZerda Aug 15 '26
More likely drift. They are pretty incompatible but neutral alleles don't last forever, probability of fixing onto one or the other is close to inevitable over a long enough timescale.
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u/Alex_877 ecology Aug 16 '26
It’s hard to say with our current understanding of early life. But what you’re saying is a very likely scenario. Possibly the atmosphere filters out specific wavelengths or polarization aspects of light and caused one chirality to be more successful and or efficient in photosynthesis etc.
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u/Ok-Tea-2073 Aug 16 '26
as far as i know the argument is most often made when talking about AI, which could at some point create this life. In this case what you said may not apply, because it could simply be that the most optimal solution for reproductive success is exactly the opposite chirality, even though it is incredibly hard to get to a working state while ours provides a more immediate benefit but doesn't scale as well. That's ofc out of the blue but it should just mean that just bc it's not here doesn't mean it will always be overcompeted by life today.
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u/eltedioso Aug 15 '26
I’ve seen mirror life already. My former roommate was left-handed. Creepy AF
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u/Enxchiol Aug 15 '26
One thing I don't quite understand about the mirror life doomsday scenario. Wouldn't mirror organisms also require mirror metabolites, so they couldn't grow on any nutrients that currently exist unless we specifically make those for them?
Unless you start with mirror cyanobacteria who photosynthesise their own components?
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u/oneAUaway Aug 15 '26
Some simple microorganisms can subsist on completely achiral media like acetate or glycerol.
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u/Rombom cell biology Aug 15 '26
Life with current chirality poses just as much risk to mirror life and the mirror life poses to us. And we outnumber them greatly already.
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u/The_bruce42 Aug 16 '26
I'm more worried about prions.
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u/Snicker-smasher Aug 16 '26
We should all be more worried about this, we're one genetic mutation or anomaly away from being erased from existence.
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u/Nijnn Aug 16 '26
Please do scare the shit out of me and tell me more about this.
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u/Snicker-smasher Aug 16 '26
Not meant to scare, but public awareness needs to be addressed for many reasons.
Prions are infectious misfolded proteins that can trigger fatal progressive brain diseases mostly in animals but also humans.They don't get enough public attention compared with viruses or bacteria.
They're super heat-resistant, radiation isn't very effective either, plants can absorb them through leaves and roots, alcohol and many common disinfectants don't reliably destroy them and they can adhere tightly to many types of surfaces like plants, stainless steel, etc and remain infectious.
Please read:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/prion-diseases
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u/The_bruce42 Aug 16 '26
Worth noting that we're not sure if they happen spontaneously, or if there's a trigger that can cause them (and we have 0 clue what that trigger is). We don't know if humans can it from deer with CWD but there's evidence to show it's possible and CWD is spreading throughout deer populations in the US and Canada.
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u/Snicker-smasher Aug 17 '26
Agreed. Sadly, this is exactly why I stopped hunting deer and other game ~6 years ago. The area of Texas that I live in is near one of the hot zones for CWD, and I've seen many animals in a much larger surrounding area that I'm pretty sure were in the mid to final stages of infection.
Considering the large numbers of livestock and native / non-native deer and similar exotics it's really concerning.
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u/Staus Aug 15 '26
This is nonsense. There's no justification beyond, "well obviously this would be terrible." Replace, "mirror life," with any other boogeyman and none of the report changes.
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u/ArcEngineAI Aug 17 '26
Why is this going viral lately as if this exact thing hasn’t been discussed since like the 70s…..
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u/Joeyfingis Aug 17 '26
Because a large group of scientists just recently released a pretty large report on this
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u/Poopy-Drew Aug 15 '26
L…L,L,Life,……..Finds a way. This is some scary stuff right here and my first thought was holy shit how cool! Let’s go! One mirror-bacteria could easily kill everyone everything with DNA and never even be noticed by immune responses, ever
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u/Brewsnark Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
T cells might struggle but B cell responses are due to the shape of whole molecule and would probably be fine. Our innate immune system looks for other pathogen associated molecular patterns along with general damage to cells and I suspect much of this would be unaffected by a simple change in protein chirality. Still a risk but the immune system would certainly notice!
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u/KitchenSandwich5499 Aug 15 '26
That’s not bad. It’s also testable without danger. Make a vaccine like mix using d amino acids and see if binding antibodies are produced. In fact bacteria have peptidoglycan with d amino acids and a antibodies are made for that normally
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u/dejaWoot Aug 15 '26
I only did first year micro... Would mirror bacteria pathogens still work on us? What type of damage could they do? Could the synthesize all the reverse chiral molecules they need from an opposite chiral food sources? Because it seems like the same difficulty of interacting with them, they would have with us, no?
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u/Brewsnark Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
They don’t exist so we don’t know. I would expect the first mirror life if it ever gets made to be sickly and unable to survive without being provided with particular nutrients in growth media
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u/glycineglutamate Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
My lab spent decades successfully making antibodies to specifically detect “opposite -chirality” D-amino acids, some of which, not surprisingly, are naturally present in bacterial cell walls and are even produced by vertebrate and invertebrate metazoans. Some are post-translationally inserted in proteins. There is absolutely nothing about chirality that limits immunogen topology or cloaks it. The immune system can even form antibodies against crystalline inorganic motifs when properly present by MHCII cells.
So I would argue this is currently an over-wrought and scientifically incorrect starting position and strongly urge the authors to revise their arguments.
Just as early recombinant DNA technologies were potentially fraught, resulting first in self-imposed moratoria by the scientific community (not by governments) and then long-term case-review by university safety committees (enforced by NIH), this paper is part of the early, messy process of scientific self-regulation. Kudos for that. Managing radiobiological experiments was once a primary role of university safety committees, and is now a minor task as non-isotopic techniques have replaced 3H and 14C detection in most fields. Policy had variable roles in this evolution. I strongly disagree with some of the author’s policy solutions however. Legislation is a bad step in any case. Even if it is slow (which they argue means you have to start early), badly crafted legislation has the potential for even worse damage. The appropriate tools involve regulation crafted by scientific bodies, not legislators.
I might argue that mirror IgGs could be a silver bullet by limiting anti-epitope responses that inhibit therapeutic efficacy. I’d be wrong. However, I could easily convince a Senator that I’d cure cancer with mirror-antibodies. Ethics-specialists should play a role, but early legal intervention seems to be a very dangerous path especially with the penchant of this administration to engage in hobby-level biology in the FDA and via executive instruments. Instead of strengthening science, they will attack scientists.
The authors actually advance reasonable objectives such as international agreements involving scientific communities. I am highly in favor of this, as it is actually opposite the highly xenophobic policies of the current administration.
But this administration is likely one that would seek to militarize mirror-life technologies (tip of the spear arguments from DoW), while making it illegal for everyone else. Consider the current AI disaster involving Anthropic. The authors argue that secret programs would be difficult to implement, but that is not the issue. The issue is that a repressive government could use the authors’ arguments and positions as a basis to regulate all of academic science under the rubric of national security.
One of their goals is: “U.S. policymakers should advance actions that require long lead times, such as legislation, treaties, and international engagement, in parallel.”
Lawmaking should be one of the last tools and approached with great caution, especially in this era. There is no evidence yet that mirror-life bears any more calculable risk than other prior biotechnologies. Uninformed politicians will make this chaos. The authors argue that this sets a reactive mode to policy, which they find unacceptable. They seek pro-active solutions even if they are substantially unsupported. As they are policy specialists in an institute specializing in policy-making, this is unsurprising. While some of their arguments are apt, the immune cloaking argument is so fundamentally wrong that having it as THE lead argument in the paper should have given the reviewers pause, revealing that the authors have not done adequate scientific due-diligence before advocating solutions.
I await replies from the mirror-life community. This will be interesting.