The full report is here:
"Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks"
https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036
The premise reminds me of the "Rifters" trilogy by biologist and science fiction author Peter Watts. In it, an archaic deep sea microorganism "ßehemoth" that outcompetes all other kingdoms of life is brought to the surface and wreaks global havoc as it spreads.
https://www.rifters.com/maelstrom/maelstrom_master.htm
A good premise (along with others) for a hard SF novel series, but it's bleak. As James Nicoll put it, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
https://rifters.com/real/author.htm
I see that a substack author has written about this "second kingdom of life" today, under the catchy heading "green goo":
https://denovo.substack.com/p/green-goo-republished
And a commenter there mentioned Rifters also.
Peter Watts’ work is indeed bleak, harsh, but brilliant. I thought Blindsight was a hard read but the Rifters trilogy is another level
For what it's worth the Blindsight pwoerpoint presentation is kind of funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU
While Blindsight and Echopraxia had some interesting world building and were both very readable books. It is worth mentioning the "science" part of them as science-fiction novels are essentially just a distillate of the most over-hyped pop-sci singularity-ism memes from the early 2000s era
A combination of "humans only use 1% of the brain" mythos married to a "super cognition unlocks emergent superpowers" results in something that's more accurately described as an unofficial entry in the Marvel cinematic universe than the hard-scifi it styles itself as.
If it makes you feel better, while someone with blindsight is able to interact with the objects in front of them through a subliminal awareness of them they can't form memories of those objects. Memory is actually very useful and consciousness[1] is necessary for its formation so you don't have to worry about non-conscious lifeforms out-competing conscious ones.
[1] In the sense that is related to blindsight. Maybe someone with blindsight still has philosophical qualia of the objects they say they can't see, I don't know
I got a blindsight vibe when interacting with early ChatGPT through rot13 but I can’t be sure if it was real uncanny valley (pseudo) consciousness or me anthropomorphizing. Probably the latter. It really shows how much work was put into making LLMs not scare people.
Conversing with early GPT-4 (in the first days of Bing chat) was surreal beyond any non-drug experience I know of. The infamous negative behaviors are well documented [0] but every part was so... alien.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-...
Made me stop reading for awhile.
I want to thank you for this comment, I went out and grabbed a copy of Starfish and just finished it, what a ride!
I did mention it I think on one of the other discussions on HN that got merged here
> The trouble with mirror cells is that they could probably evade most of the barriers that keep ordinary organisms in check. To fight off pathogens, for example, our bodies must first detect them with molecular sensors.
> Those sensors can only latch onto left-handed proteins or right-handed DNA and RNA. A mirror cell that infected lab workers might spread through their bodies without triggering any resistance from their immune systems.
It’s clear that RNA wouldn’t be complementary to mirror RNA, but antibody binding is more complex than RNA hybridization. Is it a foregone conclusion that antibodies couldn’t bind to mirror antigens?
(Degrading mirror proteins, as mentioned elsewhere in OP, does seem like a bigger obstacle.)
Antibodies can bind to wrong-handed antigens, but an antibody to a correct-handed antigen would not automatically bind the mirror. I'm not finding a lot of literaturee about this, however.
> an antibody to a correct-handed antigen would not automatically bind the mirror
I wouldn't expect it to, but rather I'd expect the immune system to learn the new antigen just like it learned the old one.
Unfortunately, seems the only way to figure this out is by testing. But on the flip, nobody can really trust that it won't accidentally or purposefully escape from labs.
They can create a few mirrored proteins and sugars and test them. Without RNA (and a lot of additional machinery) the proteins and sugars will not start to spontaneusly reproduce to conquer the word.
A prion don't have RNA, and yet they can reproduce
They can "reproduce" only in very specific environmens where there are similar non-malformed proteins nearby. It would be very hard to have a similar problem with a mirrored molecule that picks one type of normal molecules and mirror them.
Thus we can conclude military will make them. And they will escape.
We really can't. Militaries in particular aren't into bioweapons. Too hard to aim. They're pretty much strictly the domain of terrorists, and terrorists don't have the resources to execute attacks on the bleeding edge of biotech.
Remember, no one has built a regular cell from scratch, much less come close to building a mirror cell.
Military labs do work with bioweapons, and (unsurprisingly) they sometimes have trouble containing them just like regular labs.
E.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Aral_smallpox_incident
https://www.fredericknewspost.com/archives/what-went-wrong/a...
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/world/russian-scientist-d...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/07/23/army-a...
For defensive purposes, FWIW. I suppose they might create some mirror molecules to test defenses, but I believe gus_massa's point stands that you don't need to generate full, functioning cells for that purpose.
Wouldn't the bacteria be similarly disadvantaged when trying to sense its environment, eat, and reproduce in a completely mirror world?
From the article:
>The downside of having a biology that renders mirror bacteria ‘invisible’ to natural enemies is that they would not be able to consume many of the chiral nutrients found in nature. However, several nutrients, such as glycerol, are achiral (they do not have mirrored forms), and thus could be consumed by mirror bacteria. Well-intentioned scientists could also engineer mirror bacteria that can consume naturally occurring chiral molecules such as sugars and amino acids.
I don’t understand why the innate immune response wouldn’t default to attacking an organism made of chiral molecules, since it attacks anything it doesn’t recognise.
And while the adaptive immune response might not immediately recognise a novel organism, is there something that would prevent it ever adapting?
I’m sure it would attack it, and it likely would even succeed.
The problem is the chiral molecules would be difficult to clean up. You’d have this anti-life bacteria torn to pieces, yes, but then the pieces get stuck everywhere and potentially jam things.
Personally—not a biologist—it doesn’t feel like a huge risk, given we accept threats such as microplastics which do much the same thing. However, it’s a completely unnecessary threat with essentially no upsides, and it wouldn’t be possible to undo once created.
Do we really "accept" microplastics? It seems to me most scientists in the field are terrified of microplastics, while simultaneously acknowledging it's a problem that we almost assuredly can't realistically solve on any reasonable timescale.
I'm confident if we had seen microplastics coming when we first started using plastics, science at least would have tried to prevent their use becoming as widespread as it has.
Humanity knew very well that lead and mercury were highly toxic and yet only recently are they being phased out in widespread use.
The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sm1qxqdRyY
Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe.
Scientists don't have much say in these things.
> Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe.
And none of it is harmful to humans.
> > Hundreds of millions of pounds of Glyphosate is spread across the entire globe.
> And none of it is harmful to humans.
As Monsanto assures us, except when https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM (extremists are funny)
To be fair, safety is a matter of concentration and exposure. It's not safe, per se, as with any pesticide. The question is about it's lingering effects.
Table salt is safe, but you definetively not want to eat a full glass of table salt. I guess it's fatal.
Sugar is perhaps safe, there is a test for diabetes during pregnancy that consist in drinking a (small) glass of very concentrated sugar solution. I think it's not a full glass, so don't try it without medical doctor authorization and supervision.
A glass of food oil? Does it give you diarrhea?
A glass of alcohol? It's like two glasses of vodka. I think you get alcoholic coma or worse.
Also, the level of purification is different for food/medicine and other applications. Don't try to eat the salt that is sold to clean snow.
Yeah, yeah. Proof by a video from an eco-terrorist group is the best thing ever.
I would have just punched that smug moron in the face. So kudos for the Monsanto guy.
> To be fair, safety is a matter of concentration and exposure. It's not safe, per se, as with any pesticide.
It actually IS safe at any sane level. The surfactant that is added to the formulations is more dangerous than glyphosate itself.
Sometimes things are just black and white.
Humans only respond to acute threats. As a society we don’t have a means of effectively responding to long-term threats. We seem to only care about the next 5-10 years. Our species is short sighted, but I suppose evolution will correct that, eventually.
Well the average remaining life expectancy of all adult humans currently alive is probably only a little more than 10 years so it makes sense.
Are you suggesting a massive collapse is likely in ~10 years?
Why? You know how averages work?
Life expectancy and median age (didn't find average but I assume it is pretty close) were the first things I checked when I read your comment, but life expectancy globally is in the 70s and the median person about 30. I don't understand how the average person could have only a little more than 10 years left.
Some people might be minutes away from death, dragging the average way down. And the youngest of the adults alive right will probably not live more than 60-70 years max. And there’s a lot more old people right now than younger people due to increasing healthcare standards. It’s possible.
> It seems to me most scientists in the field are terrified of microplastics
Got anything you can point to? I haven't looked for a while but last time I did the evidence of harm appeared quite minimal. I recall that it was quite toxic in aquatic environments that had already been contaminated with (previously mostly harmless) low levels of heavy metals.
PTFE is similar in that it too hangs around in the environment for ages which is certainly a cause for concern. Yet it seems to be difficult to track down any known concrete negative effects. (If you are aware of any I would be interested in learning about them.)
Sure, here’s one that’s particularly disturbing and I can’t imagine long term is classified as benign.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/22/1252831...
I think this still fits the pattern I was referring to. Observation of a concerning trend but minimal or no direct evidence of harm. In this case accumulation in reproductive organs.
That article cites (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9134445).
> Animal studies have shown exposure to microplastics can impact sperm quality and male fertility,
That paper covers numerous aspects. Regarding specifically reproductive harm in mammals, it in turn cites numerous other studies at which point it becomes rather time consuming for me to get up to speed in the nuances of a field that I'm not intimately familiar with.
Having checked at least a few of the relevant citations, it looks like (most of?) the research in animal models involves short term acute rather than long term low level exposure. Not being an expert in this specific area I can't readily assess the quality or applicability of such studies. At least from what I looked through just now I'm not at all convinced that what the current animal studies are showing is (necessarily) directly relevant to low level environmental exposure.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30176444/
> exposed to 5 μm polystyrene MP at the concentrations of 100 (approximately 1.456 × 106 particles/L) and 1000 μg/L (approximately 1.456 × 107 particles/L) for the toxicological experiment.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32659591/
> the 0.5 μm, 4 μm, 10 μm polystyrene microplastics (PS-MPs) treatment groups were given 100 μL PS-MPs (10 mg/mL) by oral gavage once a day.
From my perspective there are a couple huge red flags here, and they seem to be present in all the studies I checked just now. I didn't immediately see comparisons of these protocols to the environmental conditions in the world at large (either current or predicted). Neither did I immediately see quantification of the degree and nature of the observed tissue accumulation in comparison to that observed in tissue samples collected in the wild. The latter is of particular concern because these accumulations in the laboratory happened very rapidly (over the course of a few weeks) in the face of acute exposure and impacts were then immediately measured. That doesn't really resemble what's going on in the world at large.
It is of course entirely possible that I missed something when quickly looking over studies that are outside my area of expertise. Apologies if so.
Lest it seem to you that I'm being overly pedantic here consider the difference in outcome for chlorine exposure between long term low level (ie tap water) and short term acute (ie poisoning).
Well, not anything. I have glass embedded in my foot which isn't being attacked, for example, and there are plenty of examples of biocompatible polymers, many of them already used in medical implants.
(By the way, all organisms are made of chiral molecules; what we're talking about is reversing the chirality.)
Some of the things the immune system uses to attack things, such as superoxide, would work fine on mirror organisms. Others, such as antibodies to existing organisms, wouldn't work at all. I don't know what the balance is.
Stuff binds to other stuff because the magnetic domains and shape match up well enough.
There is no way to effect something that attacks everything it doesn't recognize because a) there is no ooeration that represents not matching and b) if there was such a cell would be a short lived bomb that would blow up your body.
You adaptive immune system learns to and antigen when a short lived immune cell is semi randomly generated that binds to it and becomes a longer lived cell.
Presumably this could still happen but this normally takes days to happen. In between your inate immune system relies on being able to recognize a lot of existing antigens that are out there and common in attackers.
Having the entire library of malicious life become magically unknown means that you are relying on only your adaptive immune system is available to contain the damage.
Magnetism does not play a role in binding in biology. The primary determinants of binding are: shape complementarity, electrostatic interactions, van der waals forces, and some amount of hard to explain entropy.
(biomagnetism is a thing, but I'm not aware of any cases where binding occurs due to magnetic forces)
I think they might have meant they are all geometrically defined EM interactions.
In biology is much much muuuuch more about physics as chemistry. Is all about the shapes of very big molecules.
There are already examples of immunosilent (to humans) lipids like in Moritella.
If this is such a powerful niche for an organism to be in, why haven't they already emerged naturally over the 3 billion year history of life on earth?
I think that's a great question!
But I also think it's similar in a way to 'why matter and not antimatter' or 'why ~3d space rather than no structure' (much less obvious the second one!).
But I think the real answer here is touched-on by nmstoker in a sibling comment: We're so far down the energy-gradient of the current-default-chirality on earth, that it would take exploration of an insanely-deep valley for all molecules in a cell (there are zillions even in a bacteria!) to flip the the whole thing to the alternate chirality.
It's a bit like the idea that a good chunk of matter (like even a whole amino acid) could all spontaneously-convert to antimatter at once, sure it's possible in theory but the chances are so low we might as well say it's impossible.
But then this is also an argument against spontaneous emergence of life, right? Sicne mirror-life could just emerge on its own, instead of evolving from regular life.
Even if the timescales and environments conducive to the emergence of basic life exist on Earth today, I would expect any spontaneously-emerged proto-cell to almost immediately get eaten by normal microorganisms without any meaningful chance to proliferate. Reverse-chirality or no, it'd be a glorified bag of nutrients compared to the more evolved flora surrounding it.
Not necessarily. A pre-condition for emergence and evolution towards more complex life forms can be removed from the system by the existing complex life forms.
At the end of the day, all life is competing for energy. Spontaneous self replicators would be uncompetitive with existing biology and would never make it to more complex stages.
Life forms are effectively locked into the current set of chiral molecules. For a cell to flip, it would need all the corresponding mirror changes to happen as well, since the behaviours are interlinked - this makes it something that would be highly unlikely to occur due to evolution and why it's only realistic if carried out by people all at once.
That argument would be a good one if the time scale was shorter.
But over the course of the entire evolution of life on earth...
It's hard to argue that the step from chirality A to B is larger than all the other insanely unlikely steps evolution has taken. From earliest proto-life to complex multicellularity and beyond.
The issue is not that one chirality has to flip and you can accumulate change over long time periods, it's that every occurrence of chirality had to flip at once or the things won't work together: so the DNA has to mysteriously all get reversed (v difficult when all the DNA/RNA machinery is handed in the other direction), plus all the supporting items need to flip at that same point for all sorts of other cell functions that interlink (energy supply, waste handling etc etc).
But if your argument is given the extraordinary timeframes then why didn't life evolve again separately in the other chirality, so it wasn't descended from the earlier cells but was just a new unrelated line, then that is harder to generalise about but I recall hearing that there are sometimes slight advantages to one chirality over the opposite in certain cases as the reaction rates can differ (this is the same concept behind kinetic resolution). Perhaps life based on the less effective form would get crowded out by the more effective form, but I would defer to experts here as it's not my area.
The problem for new life with a different chirality would be that it would have to compete with the existing organisms. And the existing ones are already far, far more optimized than any new kind of life would be. So this is not comparable to the way life originally developed, where no competition existed and the entire environment was very different.
I remember learning about chirality from an Isaac Asimov article about “left-handed” sugar which, while it tastes the same as normal sugar, is unable to be metabolized by our digestive systems. I would imagine that something similar would come into play with a left-handed organism: it would be unable to consume right-handed nutrients so would starve to death. Overall, my assumption is that mirror bacteria would be unable to interact in any significant way with non-mirror organisms, but being somebody whose expertise begins and ends with reading an Isaac Asimov article on the subject as a 10-year-old, I’m very open to the possibility that I may be wrong.
The article mentions that such organisms may be able to subsist on nutrients which lack chirality.
its not a powerful niche. theres just no food available. even autotrophs and prototrophs scavenge for fully formed chiral building blocks if possible because building ftom scratch is more energy intensive than recycling
You go past all the path dependence with a external attempt at it.
I'm not particularly happy about that argument. It perfectly explains why complex organisms like bacteria don't suddenly evolve to its mirror image. But it doesn't explain why this hasn't happened at a much earlier stage in the evolutionary history.
We don't have multiple lineages of life in general. Everything is using 4 base pairs, roughly the same set of amino acids and some universally preserved genes. So there was a bottleneck where everything else was outcompeted.
So even if some mirror life chemistry was going on at some point, it just didn't make it along with all the other things that didn't.
That's sensationalism. Mirror bacteria would be at a severe disadvantage as there are no natural mirror aminoacids. Normal bacteria will quickly evolve to consume mirror aminoacids. And there are much much more normal bacteria than any possible mirror bacteria. They would be wiped out pretty quickly.
I thought the same thing initially, but I'm not as convinced after looking a bit more into it. Ie I think it's a possible risk.
>as there are no natural mirror aminoacids. Normal bacteria will quickly evolve to consume mirror aminoacids.
There are and they already have:
>D-amino acids are toxic for life on Earth. Yet, they form constantly due to geochemical racemization and bacterial growth (the cell walls of which contain D-amino acids), raising the fundamental question of how they ultimately are recycled. This study provides evidence that bacteria use D-amino acids as a source of nitrogen by running enzymatic racemization in reverse. Consequently, when soils are inundated with racemic amino acids, resident bacteria consume D- as well as L-enantiomers, either simultaneously or sequentially depending on the level of their racemase activity. Bacteria thus protect life on Earth by keeping environments D-amino acid free.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24647559/
On the one hand, this does indicate that the "mirror bacteria" might not starve immediately, but on the other hand it shows that "non-mirror bacteria" would already be there in large numbers.
It would hardly be beyond plausibility for an ingenious researcher to solve the problem of having to feed her mirror bacteria expensive L-glucose by endowing them with an enzyme to enantiomerize cheap and abundant D-glucose. Or, as you implicitly suggest, for the genome she's using to contain such an enzyme already, lurking undetected.
I reckon I generally agree that it's very unlikely that mirror-bacteria would be viable in the wild!
This is covered in the article in 2 ways though: It says that some nutrients (like glycerol) are achiral - this might mean they could still find a food source in a regular-chirality world. It also mentions that the mirror-bacterial nonstandard-chirality might 'cloak' them from regular-chirality predators (or immune-systems).
I dunno, it does seem pretty far-fetched and I am not a professional scientist so I find it hard to evaluate the risk in any worthwhile way.. but I think it still seems worth considering?
I think regular microbiology would pretty quickly adapt to the mirrors. Evolution is crazy that way.
But multicellular organisms would be at a huge disadvantage. We don't have offspring every second, so adapting to the mirrors would be nearly impossible. They'd be able to cause havoc in plant and animal life that has mechanisms for dealing with regular bacteria.
Bacteria can often synthesize all 20 amino acids themselves if they have enough carbon and nitrogen. They don't need to ingest existing amino acids from the environment.
How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it;
This is a function of how easy it is to do the banned thing, how easy it is to detect when it is being researched and what are the benefits of researching it.
Imagine as an example that we live in a world where there are no firearms, and we decide to ban their research and development. All three factors would be against the ban. It is relatively easy to make primitive firearms (all you need is metal working tools). It is hard to detect when someone is doing it (they can keep their firearms secret, and the tools and activity disguised as something else) and the firearm once developed will be of great benefit to whoever developed it.
So a blanket ban against firearms would be unstable. It wouldn't work.
Let's look at an other example. Nuclear weapons. They are much harder to create (you need a whole industrial project to develop the tech, lot of engineers, and lot of energy consuming processes), there are pre-cursor technologies you can monitor to have an early warning (uranium enrichment, centrifuges, etc), it doesn't have immediate benefits unless you also develop a reliable delivery mechanism for it.
And these are the factors while nuclear weapons don't proliferate everywhere. You can't buy them in the mall, smaller countries don't have them etc.
I don't know what the answer to these questions are for "mirror life" but the framework is the same.
How hard is to develop it? If a single dude in a shed can do it, there is probably no point banning it. It will happen sooner than later. If it requires coordinated effort from multiple research groups and industrial partners, then a ban might work.
How hard is detect when someone is developing it? Can they hide it? Is the process using common materials and equipment? Do they need to get stuff only people who develop mirror life would need?
But the final question is the most important: What do they win? If there is some military benefit to developing "mirror life" then we are lost, and it will be developed. If there is some big economic benefit a ban might work, but it will be an uphill battle. If there is no benefit to it, and it is just cool and interesting to do, it will be a lot simpler for a ban to hold.
That's a great framework for assessing it, thank you!
It seems to me that to a degree nuclear weapons show some of the problems with a research ban. I think that it's possible that nuclear weapons are proliferating just very slowly. The problem seems to be that once someone engages in forbidden research, then their rivals feel the need to as well. E.g. we allowed China to get a nuclear weapon so India decided they needed one which led to Pakistan needing one. More currently, we allowed Israel to get nuclear weapons so now Iran is likely trying to get them.
It's also notable that the two instances where people gave up nuclear weapons, Gaddafi and Ukraine; have both ended poorly for the people who gave them up.
All this to say, I wonder if it might be possible to slow research on a subject but not to stop it completely.
Several other countries also gave them up with better results. Including South Africa, Sweden, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
Belarus and Kazakhstan are vassal states of Russia now and for the foreseeable future; possibly they will be annexed officially at some point, like the Crimea and probably Donbas. Sweden would probably still be neutral if it hadn't given up its nuclear weapons; it seems to be at significant risk of being invaded by Russia again (it was invaded in the 18th century and again in the 19th), which is why it joined NATO in March. That, in turn, puts it at great risk of going to war this decade even if it doesn't get invaded, for the first time in 200 years.
It's unclear if Belarus and Kazakhstan really had nukes in the first place such that they could "give them up"—as with Ukraine, the nukes stationed there were Soviet nukes, controlled by Moscow.
South Africa does seem to be doing okay, though. It's not that likely to be invaded by Zimbabwe, and since the end of apartheid, a civil war is looking increasingly unlikely.
Kazakhstan is by no means a Russian vassal state, and is in essentially no danger of annexation. It's worlds away from Belarus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Kazakh_unrest#7_January
> Tokayev (...) went on to thank Russia for sending troops to help establish order.
> Russia's Defence Ministry stated that more than 70 planes were flying, around the clock, to bring Russian troops into Kazakhstan and that they were helping to control Almaty's main airport.
On the other hand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan%E2%80%93Russia_rela...
> Kazakh leadership including Kazakh Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi did not condemn the Russian invasion and abstained on the UN vote to condemn it, but at the same time they refused to recognize the Russian states of Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.
> In addition to sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the Kazakh military increased spending and training. (...)
> Russia suspended shipments of Kazakh oil after Tokayev’s statements at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he stated that Kazakhstan considered the DPR and LPR as “quasi-state entities” and would not recognize them. On the other hand, in spite of some tensions, Kazakhstan's relations with Russia remain strong and mostly friendly, as shown by Tokayev's visit to Moscow in November 2022. (...)
> In 2022, Kazakhstan agreed to share the personal data of exiled anti-war Russians with the Russian government. In September 2022, Kazakh authorities detained a Russian journalist who was wanted on charges of "discrediting" the Russian military. In December 2022, Kazakhstan deported a Russian citizen who fled mobilization.
I'm no expert in foreign relations, but to me, this sounds like the relationship between the Trump administration and the municipal government of Portland, Oregon, not like the relationship between France and Germany, the relationship between Argentina and Brazil, or even the profoundly unequal relationship between the US and Canada. Tokayev can posture a bit about disagreeing with Putin, but Russia will punish him, and when push comes to shove, he depends on Russian military support to stay in power; and when Russian dissidents or draft dodgers show up in Kazakhstan, he arrests and deports them. (Contrast Vietnam-War-era US draft dodgers fleeing to Canada.)
They can leverage China at this point. They have options. They told the extra Russian military to leave after the last unrest.
Argentina, Brazil. although they say brazil is just a few days away of developing a nuclear bomb if it decides to. It would not be able to throw it anywhere useful tho at maximum south american neighbors
Neither Argentina nor Brazil has ever had nuclear weapons, although both countries did historically produce low-grade enriched reactor fuel. Argentina resumed its enrichment activity in 02015. Brazil resumed its enrichment activity in 02006 but still does not have enough production capacity to supply even its minuscule fleet of nuclear power stations.
> Neither Argentina nor Brazil has ever had nuclear weapons
Brazil holds the key technologies to develop it and the sixth bigger deposit of uranium (with only 30% of the territory mapped). The navy is even currently developing a nuclear submarine that will be totally based on local technology.
Yes, both Argentina and Brazil could produce nuclear weapons, given enough time and effort, but neither one of them has ever had them. Neither does either country currently have plans to produce or acquire nuclear weapons, as far as is publicly known. So they are not examples of countries that gave up nuclear weapons.
A nuclear submarine is also not what is meant by "nuclear weapon", although it is arguably a weapon and has the word "nuclear" in its name. The phrase "nuclear weapon" conventionally refers to "atomic bombs" and "hydrogen bombs", which are bombs powered by respectively fission and fusion. A nuclear submarine is just a regular submarine powered by a nuclear reactor. Brazil already has many nuclear reactors that are in some sense "totally based on Brazilian technology" and has for decades.
> Brazil already has many nuclear reactors that are in some sense "totally based on Brazilian technology" and has for decades.
I only knew of the three commercial reactors, the third of them under construction for something like four decades and still far from done (and they are also mostly foreign technology AFAIK). So I went looking, and it does seem there are a couple of decades-old research reactors I didn't know about: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_reatores_nucleares_Br...
Ten, in fact. Most places have a lot more research and medical reactors than power reactors in nuclear power stations, because you can build one of those for something like 1% of the cost of a nuclear power station. (Remember that the first research reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was built under the stands in a football field, by a team of about 30 people, between November and December of 01942, without any engineering data from existing reactors, on a budget of under 3 million dollars—US$51 million in today's money: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=2700&year1=194....)
I went to a state university in the US that had its own research reactor, and I thought their university hospital had another one, but it turns out they don't now if they ever did.
There is no benefit to disease as a weapon they aren't containable nor faster than nukes.
You unleash green too ensuring your targets liquidation in 6 weeks they inform you to share your own defense against it or get nuked tomorrow. You share it but it adapts and everyone dies.
- [deleted]
We don’t research what happens when a child falls out of a plane and nobody feels like we’re falling behind for it.
I think that the difference may be that there's relatively little benefit or desire to researching children falling out of planes and we have fairly easy ways to study the question indirectly (accelerometers, cadaver studies, animal studies, etc.).
Also, there are numerous examples throughout history of people performing evil human studies; so while people may not have studied children falling from planes, people have studied equivalent things.
We actually did, it's a solved problem.
Research bans do not inherently work.
Treaties need enforced, and the Streisand effect and arms-race dynamic play into the game theory as well.
There is no potential profit in researching that, this isn’t the case with mirror chirality organisms.
Without directly addressing your proposed experiment, the history of aviation was filled with all sorts of grotesque experiments on humans. Absolutely disgusting stuff, like suffocating people to simulate high altitude flight. There was an ethical quandary about whether to use this data (IE, as citations).
but would a ban really stop somebody from trying?
If you can't get funding for your research, or publish under your real name if you do, it's certainly going curtail research at least. It could still happen if some nations refuse to endorse the ban, but there will at least be less of it, which means less risk.
That is to say, our enemies will master it first and we will be caught with our pants down.
By something liable to end human life when it inevitably adapts?
It actually makes sense to just go ahead and go to war with anyone who works on such weapons.
We're not talking about a targeted weapon, we're talking about accidentally unleashing an unstoppable global pandemic. If only China is risking that, the odds are better for everyone.
Why wouldn't they make it into a targeted weapon? Us humans turn everything else into a weapon.
Because wiping out all of the world's importers/exporters would cripple China.
If they somehow survive of course.
it can be targeted during war.
We are talking about an all-infecting pandemic. You can certainly weaponize it, if you think global collapse sounds fun. What you can't do is target it.
If you and only you (and maybe some allies) also make an antidote or vaccine, it is targeted at everyone who doesn't. And that is a huge blackmail opportunity.
OFC, if any leader worth their salt will respond with "Hell NO, if you threaten us again with that, or we find any sign it is released, we'll nule everything in your land and anywhere it is found. Even if a vaccine/antidote works for humans, destroying the animal & plant populations would just result in the surving humans to die slower of starvation.
Thinking about this for a few seconds, it is really pointless, and maybe one of the most serious examples of "Just because you can do it, think hard about whether you should do it". The answer is Fck NO. (And I'm almost always in favor of tech advances.)
This sort of rhetoric is disgusting, and likely the exact sort that will lead to mass death incidents in our lifetime. I hope you think about that when such comes to pass.
I'll die happy, knowing "I told you so."
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> How does a research ban even work? It seems to me that at some point someone is going to research it; at which point everyone is left flat footed by having not researched it.
Someone's going to need to work it out, because if the problem of "how to ban existentially dangerous things" is not solved, eventually we'll be fucked.
And realistically, we're probably fucked, because humanity probably simply lacks the maturity to not fuck itself over at some point (e.g. because of the logic "if we don't do it someone else will" is scarily effective, and some people are just unhinged for really stupid reasons). We probably only made it this far because of external constraints limited what we could do.
Part of me thinks it may turn out that a that a full-scale nuclear war that knocks out industrial civilization (especially if it's followed by A Canticle for Leibowitz-style anti-intellectual social changes) may not be such a bad thing in the long run, if it buys humanity a few more millennia.
If no one would publish it no one would do it.
After understanding what "mirror bacteria" is I have one word and that's "Yikes"
Maybe we should manufacture and stockpile mirror antibiotics, in case of accidental or intentional release of such organisms.
This appeals to me both as a defensive/protective measure and as a deterrent to others who might look to weaponize such organisms.
How would we test that the mirror antibiotics actually work without developing mirror organisms and exposing ourselves to the associated risks?
They aren’t going to be mirror copies of terrestrial organisms, there’s no guarantee that mirror copies of our antibiotics will work (AFAIK it’s actually very unlikely). Protein binding sites change when mirrored because it’s not just mirror image but a change in how the proteins twist when folding, which is why most of them are sensitive to chirality. Only very simple molecules are likely to behave the same.
Stuff like bleach will still work by denaturing proteins and disrupting the bilipid layer in cell membranes but anything like tetracycline and penicilin that targets peptidoglycan enzymes or ribosomes or other complex biochemistry almost certainly won’t.
Mirror antibiotics must work in mirror bacteria. Mirror proteins should fold exactly like normal proteins, but mirrored. (There may be a problem with the weak force, but I never heard it's used in biology.)
Mirror symmetry breaks down in counter-intuitive ways in physics, that probably bubbles up into the chemistry side of things too. Not always, and not often. Probably just often enough to be confusing, and in this case, starkly terrifying and spirit-crushing.
> probably bubbles up into the chemistry side of things too
it never has so far. many experiments have been done, including an enzyme reaction
Ok, sounds completely safe then. Go ahead and work on your mirror life frankenstein experiments, we should be good.
That is a completely different thing.
Prove it. Prove that there's not some corner case where a mirrored molecule stops behaving chemically the same towards other mirrored molecules.
The technical term is "parity simetry" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_(physics) that means that a system and the mirrored version behave exactly in the same way.
Chemistry is about electromagnetism, and electromagnetism has parity symmetry. Also gravity is somewhat important, but gravity also has parity symmetry. And even the strong force has parity symmetry. So for all practical purpuses, chemistry has parity symmetry and when you mirror a bunch of molecules, the mirrored versions will behave exacly as the normal ones.
But ... if you were looking carefuly I didn't mention the weak force, because it breaks the parity symmetry. It's very difficult to prove it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment You have to get a bunch of radioactive cobalts, put them in a strong magnetic field, keep them super cold, and you will get 60% of the decays in one direction and 40% in the other, breaking the 50% and 50% expectation if it didn't break the parity symmetry.
Can this experiment be reproduced in a chemistry molecule?????
I need more questions marks ????????
I think no one has done it and it looks very difficult to try. Can I use my imagination and make will guess?
Let's say you get something like the hemo part of hemoglobin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heme It has four nice nitrogens that probably can bind to cobalt instead, or perhaps you need a variant. Now make some substitutions to break the symmetry so it it's like a recycle symbol that has a clear direction. Add some bridge under the plane, perhaps connect the small part that is bellow the graphic that I'm not sure why iis useful.
And make the mirrored version too.
Now, if the design was super smart, most of the cobalts in a version will have the north pole pointing to the bridge, and the mirrored version will have the south pole. I'm not sure it's possible, but I can handwave some explanation that say it's possible, but perhaps this idea makes no sense.
Now, did I mention you need radioactive cobalt? When it desintegrates it send an electron that will sometimes colide with the bridge and destroy it, or go in the other direction and keep the molecule without changes.
So after some time the you can see that the time to self destruction is different in the original and the mirrored version.
In conclussion, I think it's possible but no one has done it, no sane person would try it, and if someone get it working then they will get a Nobel price.
It will be very expensive, and completely unuseful, so I completely not expect to see something like this is a living cell.
There is another mathematical kind in string theory which I thought they were misappropriating.
I meant that physics uses the term in a different context.
> Protein binding sites change when mirrored because it’s not just mirror image but a change in how the proteins twist when folding, which is why most of them are sensitive to chirality
Wouldn't this pretty much rule out the synthetic creation of mirror bacteria? We should not just be able to rewrite a simple existing lifeform in mirrored version; we should recode all its proteins from scratch so that they keep their function in a mirror version, assuming that that's even possible.
I think the folding/etc would all be mirrored as well if all the components were on mirror-chirality and the overall molecular-kinetic behavior of the result would in-theory be the same when zoomed-out too (assuming it doesn't encounter too many normal-chirality molecules I guess - would be just as dangerous to them as mirror-chirality is to us).
This should mean that if the DNA is mirror (no need to alter the sequence), and the RNA/proteins/etc are as well (like 100% made of the mirror-chiral molecules), then in isolation it might work just the same as regular-life, just twisting the other way?
Kinda does seem like it might be a bit arbitrary what direction things should curl in, however there are maybe aspects of how quantum-spin might interact with things that might rule out stability with mirror-chirality? I am not a QM scientist but I do find it very fascinating!
Yeah I think the risk is completely overblown but after the controversy over COVID and Wuhan gain of function research, bioethics discourse seems to have taken a conservative turn.
Long before we’d be able to bootstrap a fully mirrored organism we’d have to develop synthetic biotech that could easily weaponize something already scary like ebola or hendra virus. Synthetic organisms have so far been paired down versions of existing bacteria, not engineered and assembled from the ground up. Once we’re capable of the latter, mirror organisms are just one entry on a very long list of existential threats.
I think the real risk in the foreseeable future is horizontal gene transfer of chiral checkpoint proteins. In order to insert even a single nontrivial D protein into the genome, we’d have to modify the proteins that make sure everything is L-handed. If those managed to escape into the wild, the results would be completely unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. Bacteria mutate and evolve much faster than mammals so if any of them develop surface proteins that are functionally equivalent but D-handed, they could become resistant to antibiotics and our immune systems.
Reading through the report, the trouble turns out to be that "devastating disease for humans" is possibly the least of our problems. Even if we had a perfect stockpile of antibiotics that would protect humans against any possible mirror organism (we'd need a wide variety, right?), all of our crops and livestock would be wiped out. All the forests. All the plankton. It would be really bad.
This is how every arms race starts.
"The baddies will use this as a weapon, so we need to get ahead of this, and manufacture the nastiest variants we can come up, so that we know how to DEFEND against them. It's defense, I say!"... Then eventually there is a lab leak, and there is a pandemic on your hand.
A lab leak of racemic sulfonilamide or ciprofloxacin would not only be a non-event; it's probably something that happens regularly already. The issue would be if people were harvesting their mirror penicillin from mirror mold or something.
This should say "sulfanilamide", which is a sulfonamide, thus my spelling confusion.
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Searching HN for "mirror cells", I see at least 1 article warning of the dangers from more than 10 years ago. So, this has been a thing for a while. Any biologists here that can chime in on just how big of a risk they do pose? Is there a general consensus throughout the community that this research should end? Is this something that could be developed for bio-terrorism? Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case?
no. antibodies will work just fine on a d-protein and one of their mechanisms of killing is to generate ozone, which is an achiral molecule.
there is currently ~no risk because generating mirror life is such a monumental task. we dont have a full biological bootstrap sequence currently. even syn1.0 which was a synthetic genome transplant and rebooting operation, required a living host cell to transplant the DNA into, and the genomic dna does go from a computer file, but only the smallest ~100 bp fragments are made by robots and chemistry; intermediate fragments are assembled and amplified in enzyme reactions, bacteria, and yeast.
in principle you could get these to be entirely in vitro, but the yields would be nearly nil. and the expense of mirror dna monomers is... i can't even imagine. you'd probably bankrupt a midsize nation on that. and theres no motivation to decrease the cost because there's not really any other practical use for mirror dna outside of fucking around scientifically. and thats just the DNA. our ability to synthetically make proteins taps out at around 150-200 residues (maybe 2-4x that if you can get clever with native chemical ligation) and the purification and isolation at that length is truly a nightmare, not to mention refolding longer sequences is also hard.
I don't think anyone is worried about mirror proteins by themselves, they are worried about someone assembling a self-replicating/self-propagating mirror life, no? In which case, the fear is that you can't just run around ozone-ing every little colony of chiral-mirror version of cyanobacteria under every rock in remote Siberia or wherever.
1. > Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case?
2. by way of direct response to your question. mirror nutrients (like scavenged AAs, even for autotrophs) are liable to be very scarce so they'll have one hell of a disadvantage makimg it on this world.
Not if you engineer your mirror bacterium to eat normal nutrients to get them started. Or they scavenge enough non-chiral molecules to eat that they get the opportunity to evolve the capability on their own.
building from non chiral molecules is prototrophy, not scavenging. anyways, existing lifeform already scavenge mirror molecules (especially d-ala since thats used in cell walls) so they are already competing in a quite saturated environment with highly adapted organisms.
I'm really curious to know the details here. What is the minimal set of dependencies for the simplest autotroph?
Clearly there was an original self-replicating cell and it was successful, so assuming we constructed the necessary proteins, why do you think it would be difficult the second time?
This is the big question about abiogenesis. If it was easy then life in the universe could be very common. If it is exceedingly difficult, we might be alone.
What is the smallest set of molecules needed to self-replicate, and how common are the ingredients (& nutrients)? I believe all of this is completely unknown, but I havent looked into the research for years now.
I think for the purpose of this topic, we only care about the nutrition (to use your word) question. We can assume humans can intelligently bootstrap past the other abiogenesis problems.
And surely this shouldn't be a difficult question to answer, right? Put an autotroph (the simplest that we know of) in a test tube and give it a ever-stricter diet and observe how far you can go without it dying off.
mimimal prototroph media is glucose, phosphate, ammonium, and trace metals that you just assume are in the water source. this is called m9 media. many known organisms can live on m9, including iirc bakers yeast and e coli.
if its fully autotrophic you dont need to add glucose. i think some forms of nocardia can live on m9 minus glucose.
of course anything that can live on m9 has way more genes in it just to biosynthesize the necessary amino acids and nucleic acids. That's why syn1 is a mycobacterium -- fewer genes because it has almost no metabolism. if you look at the biochemical pathways for mycobacterium its laughable how much is greyed out
What a great answer for a fascinating subject.
syn 2.0? 3.0? is poking at the minimum set of genes for life, but that organism needs a lot of things to survive. i think it grows on horse serum
A completely "mirrored" organism is not that dangerous.
- It would still have antigenic properties, just not the ones we are familiar with, because antigens are proteins or proteins bound to sugars. Both have "left" vs "right" variants.
- It can't eat any ordinary food, except simple fats. Common proteins and sugars won't fit it's enzymes. That means it can't digest sugars, proteins or any combination that contains them. It also means it can't attack and decompose our tissues, so it would have no way to enter our bodies.
- With only simple lipids as food, it would need to take all Nitrogen from the atmosphere or inorganic compounds, which means it can't really be a pathogen for humans (or any animals) even if it could somehow enter our organisms. However, it could live on the soil and possibly be a plant pathogen.
- It's "mirrored" toxins won't have any effect on us. (But compounds that are normally benign possibly could be toxic if "mirrored" - I can't say for sure if it's possible.)
So much confidence about how this thing we’ve never encountered will not be a problem.
that’s fairly on brand for hackernews
doubly so if it’s from a person with no expertise in the relevant field
I studied microbiology and biochemistry and I work in a medical lab.
Let's agree that news and articles that are shocking, scary, but not likely to happen, aka. clickbait, are even more common than comments like mine.
Mirror organisms or not...we're doomed.
Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms. Say, if a predator attacked a mirror bacteria, and ate it, it would be just like eating an inedible microplastic particle. A technological analogue would be to change tensions in electric outlets at random, between 115V and 230V standards, with no indication of which outlet has which tension. People would start blowing equipment left and right.
More specifically, it would have no interoperability with the portions of life that target chiral molecules.
Most critically, metabolic pathways.
But that isn't to say there isn't already varied chirality in nature [0]. The primary reason life is generally aligned to one chirality is because its very purpose is to interoperate with the living environment around it.
>> Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms.
That sounds like a good thing but... Our food chain starts at the bottom with bacteria turning nutrients into bio-molecules right? These bacteria are eaten by other things going up the food chain ultimately to us. What if some bacteria got loose at that bottom level and started eating all the nutrients with no natural predators? What if it out-competed those with predators? That might be game over for life as we know it.
I'm NOT saying this would happen, just that it one of thousands of possible scenarios one can come up with that go very badly. No one can say with certainty which things would or would not happen.
The report's scenario is a photosynthetic mirror bacterium eating the bottom out from under the oceanic food web. The existing predators would not be able to eat them, and so they would grow fast, and their predators would then shrink in population and that interaction would ripple upwards sending marine animals extinct.
It would be way worse than micro plastic and closer to your 115v example.
The parts would be similar enough to form bonds and trigger receptors, but different enough to become permanently stuck, unable to be processed.
So thats why we were made to extract fossil fuels and "dispose" plastic and research bacteria. Hope Life 2.0 writes footnotes about biped cities making plastic mines like we write about Jurassic shellfish providing soil suitable for US cotton.
I life has to completely restart on this planet, there probably won't be time for things as complex as us to evolve again before the sun turns into a red giant.
Why wouldn't it work in the other direction though? The mirror cells would be competing for the same ambidextrous resources (for my lack of a better term). Sugar is chiral isnt it? Would they be able to digest normal chiral resources?
pick up your house key, hold it in front of a mirror, look at the key, and the reflection. you should notice the side of key away from mirror is visible, the reflection shows the other side of key .
so the sides of key, and reflection are switched relative to the key.
if you could somhow pluck the reflection from a mirror and try to use it, the left side is right, and right side is left.
when this happens with molecules, there is different parts of the molecules being brought together, leading to alternate interactions, thus different reaction path
Sugars are chiral. The wrong-handed glucose would be a great sugar replacement, but it's too expensive to synthesize.
The only major non-chiral nutritional molecules are fatty acids.
> The wrong-handed glucose would be a great sugar replacement, but it's too expensive to synthesize.
That's not the problem. There's a recent patent on synthesizing L-glucose cheaply.[1] The problem is that L-glucose turns out to be a strong laxative.[2]
Levoglucose (L-glucose) is the stereoisomer of D-glucose. L-Glucose does not occur naturally in higher living organisms, but can be synthesized in the laboratory. L-Glucose is indistinguishable in taste from D-glucose, but cannot be used by living organisms as source of energy because it cannot be phosphorylated by hexokinase, the first enzyme in the glycolysis pathway. Levoglucose may be used as diagnostic aid. It has been investigated as a non-nutritive food sweetener. However, L-glucose produced significant laxation, with an average of 4 to 5 loose watery stools in a 24-hour period. This laxative property clearly reduced the use of L-glucose as a food additive. The mechanism of laxation after L-glucose ingestion is unknown, but malabsorption of the compound with secondary osmotic diarrhea is likely. L-glucose is a well-tolerated, safe, and efficacious means of cleansing the colon for colonoscopy.
Ah the Haribo sugar free gummi bear effect.
Reminds me of how some of the races from Mass Effect (notably turians and quarians) have the opposite chirality to our own, which means humans can't be nourished by their food and vice-versa. Interspecies sex is also complicated by this difference, so turians and quarians tend to date each other (when they date outside their species).
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886
A 'Second Tree of Life' Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886
Since that thread didn't make the front page, we'll merge those comments hither. Interested readers may want to look at both articles.
A short story/cautionary tale on this very subject: https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world
How much achiral food would be available for these bacteria anyways in nature? They'd have to compete for it with all other life.
You also have to consider the risk, however small, that mirror bacteria released in the wild survive just long enough to naturally evolve to consume the common chiral form of whatever molecule. We've observed that bacteria can evolve rapidly to changing environments, so it's not out of the question.
Seems like some kind of achiral algae would actually be the most dangerous.
People forget that blue-green algae caused a global climate apocalypse, polluted the oceans and atmosphere with deadly oxygen, caused all exposed iron to rust massively changing ocean chemistry, and threw the entire globe into an ice-age that lasted 300 million years.
I wonder how we would stop something like that. It'd be like the algae bloom from hell. Plankton likely wouldn't be very successful in attempting to eat it.
The report goes into a green goo scenario, a photosynthetic mirror bacterium eating the bottom of the oceanic food web and sending stuff up the chain extinct. One scenario that they deem less likely is it sucking enough co2 out of the atmosphere to doom us to an ice age, though they couldn't rule it out.
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Besides the achiral glycerol mentioned in the article, some bacteria subsist on methane. That is also non-chiral and in large quantity in petroleum and under the sea.
If you have the technological proficiency to synthesize mirror chemistry cells from scratch, I'm hoping that implies you also have the ability to engineer e.g. bacteria that feed on reverse chirality molecules & turn them back into standard form, or create other mitigations. Safer not to make them at all though.
Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria. Or compound microbes that can eat both mirror bacteria and regular bacteria, so that we can deploy them before we create mirror bacteria. For example, there is already a bacterium that can eat L-sugar, which is a mirror of regular sugar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose
Once the mirror creature is big enough, it will not matter that it is an indigestible mirror creature, as the predator will eat it regardless. So we only need to create mirror predators up to a certain level.
> Why not create mirror viruses to infect these mirror bacteria? And mirror predators to consume the mirror bacteria.
"No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death."
The risk is of the rhetorical winter taking too long to roll around, and mirror life forms managing to hold on for long enough to gain the ability to feed on non-mirrored nutrients. In the worst-case scenario, with no predators, they could rapidly outcompete and replace the bottom end of the ecosystem, resulting in the collapse of everything above, which would be far worse than the slow-growing infectious diseases described in the article.
Microscopic organisms mutate rapidly and unpredictably, so this sounds like a "swallow a spider to catch the fly" situation.
Mirror bacteria evolving the ability to eat normal sugar would be the killer.
The report suggests releasing mirror phages, but they could only control the bacteria, not eliminate them. And they would likely evolve resistance so we'd have to somehow boot up an entire ecosystem of phages to keep things under control.
This reminds me of the different foods in Anathem; the different people (Trying to keep this spoiler-free.) are unable to digest the the foods the others eat.
There needs to be an international body established to set standards and limitations on biological research, and it's edicts should be enforced very aggressively.
Unfortunately, even in the aftermath of a massive global disruption directly due to the creation of organisms which are supernaturally able to defeat human immune systems, it's still the wild west. There's effectively very little limitations on research that could quite literally end humanity and disrupt all life on earth, and the limitations that do exist are actively skirted, ignored with violations covered up after the fact.
I think it is reasonable to assume that the immune system would have to work harder against mirror pathogens. Straight toxicity might be another important consideration.
On the other hands mirror amino acids already exist in nature, so I find the argument that a mirror bacteria would rampage the ecosystem unchecked sensationalist. Click-bait even. More likely than not, the mirror bacteria itself would be heavily outcompeted in the wild.
Agreed that modelling it as a "pathogen" is missing the mark.
But predatorless photosynthetic self-replicating gray goo that grows exponentially across the planet, resulting in a drastic change in CO2 and oxygen levels across the globe? Wouldn't be the first time. [1]
Presumably that's gotten a lot harder/less likely given that we've had billions of years since and life fills a lot more niches. But that's not really something to bet civilization on without a bit more evidence.
The difference is there is competition now.
Also: in all risk analysis you'd have to consider the upside. The upside here is none. We are 99.9% sure that there's nothing special about our side of the mirror. So with 0 upside besides "writing a paper" or "because no one has done it, so who knows?", it doesn't really matter that the risk may be small. It just doesn't make sense to do it.
Did Star Trek not already warn us about this one?
There's this meme about how sci-fi cautionary tales fly over people's heads,
> At long last, we have finally created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
Don’t forget its thrilling sequel, “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus, Again”.
Clarke warned us, in "2061: Odissey 3" (Beware: spoilers):
> The doctor seemed to be struggling for words. 'What, dammit?' 'Something came up out, of the water, Like a parrot beak, but about a hundred times bigger. It took - Rosie - with one snap, and disappeared. We have some impressive company here; even if we could breathe outside, I certainly wouldn't recommend swimming -' 'Bridge to Captain,' said the officer on duty, 'Big disturbance in the water - camera three - I'll give you the picture.' 'That's the thing I saw!' cried the doctor. He felt a sudden chill at the inevitable, ominous thought: I hope it's not back for more. Suddenly, a vast bulk broke through the surface of the ocean and arched into the sky. For a moment, the whole monstrous shape was suspended between air and water. The familiar can be as shocking as the strange - when it is in the wrong place. Both captain and doctor exclaimed simultaneously: 'It's a shark!' There was just time to notice a few subtle differences - in addition to the monstrous parrot-beak - before the giant crashed back into the sea. There was an extra pair of fins - and there appeared to be no gills. Nor were there any eyes, but on either side of the beak there were curious protuberances that might be some other sense organs. 'Convergent evolution, of course,' said the doctor. 'Same problems, same solutions, on any planet. Look at Earth. Sharks, dolphins, ichthyosaurs - all oceanic predators must have the same basic design. That beak puzzles me, though -' 'What's it doing now?' The creature had surfaced again, but now it was moving very slowly, as if exhausted after that one gigantic leap. In fact, it seemed to be in trouble - even in agony; it was beating its tail against the sea, without attempting to move in any definite direction. Suddenly, it vomited its last meal, turned belly up, and lay wallowing lifelessly in the gentle swell. 'Oh my God,' whispered the Captain, his voice full of revulsion. 'I think I know what's happened.' 'Totally alien biochemistries,' said the doctor; even he seemed shaken by the sight. 'Rosie's claimed one victim, after all.' The Sea of Galilee was
Not that I recall — closest I can think of would either be TOS evil twin made from antimatter, the mirror universe in general, or Nelix' coffee.
But I have seen it as a short story about how the world ends, some synthetic bacteria that was meant to be reversed chirality for safety, but eventually it went wild and could eat everything without itself being eaten by anything.
Yes. I remeber that one too. It started with reversed sugar used for weight loss. It was made by reversed ecoli, which escaped.
This is it: https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world
Yup, that's the one. Thanks :)
If this was ‘Starfish’ it was longer than a short story
I don't think so; I've looked up the story, and what I remember doesn't match the setting of the summary I've seen of that novel — assuming it was the Peter Watts novel, because while I kinda assumed you wouldn't have meant the Lisa Fipps novel of the same name, there may be others with that name which I just don't know about.
I also saw a 2-part documentary recently about someone who caught a highly contagious virus (the so called "rage" virus) that led to disastrous consequences. We know these risks are real.
There was a fairly recent issue of the Fantastic Four about this as well.
(where "fairly recent" means part of Ryan North's excellent run)
Surprised nobody mentioned ‘Starfish’ by Peter Watts.
How about we make mirror prions that affect/infect mirror bacteria, but are inert to us? It becomes a targeted therapy.
"Let's make synthetic prion diseases!" sounds like a phrase that'd make a biologist shudder.
The claim that mirror molecules would not be subject to immune surveillance makes no sense to me. The immune system is happy to react to non-biological molecules. It reacts to shapes, not chirality. It is a separate question whether the immune response could break into mirror membranes and break down mirror molecules.
The pMHC-TCR complex, which is the cornerstone of the adaptive immune system, has evolved to bind peptide epitopes.
Most D-amino acids are known to bind MHC poorly and lead to reduced TCR recognition. I imagine this could increase the chances of evading immune surveillance.
Are you certain? The immune system detects molecules partly due to their shape, i.e. where binding points are on the proteins. I can imagine it being the case where the immune system's proteins no longer match up with the invader's because of the mirroring.
If you 3d print a mirrored house key, the bitting may line up with the original, but the warding wouldn't fit anymore. I think that's a reasonable analogy to the way proteins match up.
Early studies (1970's and earlier) used the antigen (hapten) di-nitro-phenol (DNP) to explore antibody diversity (how many different antibodies might be raised against a simple small molecule). DNP is very simple (non-chiral) structure that generates a diverse set of antibodies.
Whether an antibody raised against one structure interacts with a different structure is irrelevant to the question of whether an antibody can be raised to the other structure.
Most parts of the innate immune system recognize specific shapes like nucleic acids, while the adaptive immune system is more flexible in what it can recognize.
Some scientists in the Manhattan Project worried that the first nuclear test could trigger a chain reaction that would annihilate the earth.
These fears were unfounded.
(Granted, atmospheric nuclear weapons testing has its own set of subtle consequences that are gradually becoming more well known.)
I don't quite understand the meaning of your comment, it reads to me like "one time people worried about something but their worries were unfounded" with the subtext/implication that "therefore we don't need to worry" - about this? Or maybe need to worry in general? Or is it just to feel a bit more optimism that not every doomsday fear ends up coming to fruition?
> Or is it just to feel a bit more optimism that not every doomsday fear ends up coming to fruition?
Exactly.
I suspect mirror-image molecule life hasn't evolved because it wouldn't be fit enough to be self-sustaining.
Many invasive species get into new ecosystems only with human help. They can’t do it on their own, but once they’re there… Asian carp and zebra mussels.
I'm not in favor of a full-on precautionary principle for everything.
But if you take on too many 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 risks, eventually things go badly.
Russian roulette or reckless driving looks safe-- for awhile.
Note the person who really advanced the view of "igniting the atmosphere" with fission was Teller back in 1942, who was about the most pro-nuclear scientist you can find. They didn't just shrug and push the button: Bethe and others did a lot of math to conclude that it was exceptionally unlikely.
(Was it too much of a risk, given that we didn't have much experimental data about nitrogen-nitrogen cross-sections? Probably not, but we can't conclude that it was a reasonable risk purely on the basis of "we didn't die.")
But that's just one example of scientists warning about something and being wrong; it's just an anecdote that you can't draw much from.
No, they calculated the likelihood of this as being acceptably low. Are you criticising that they checked?
> These fears were unfounded.
Sure, but it's good to prove that one out before pressing the button.
Especially when there are zero other considerations making you (or the people funding you) think you need to rush past testing.
And when it was found out it wouldn't (at smaller scales), they figured out how much they'd have to scale it up to accomplish that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)
Seems like the risks of this research are similar to prions.
Conversely, Great Filter.
No discussion of Peter Watts' Rifters should omit a clear content warning.
It's full of his own fetish, misogynistic sadism, and without kink shaming, I can say this makes these books—which are otherwise interesting and memorable—literally unrecommendable.
Caveat lector
This is just Open Philanthropy laundering weird billionaire concerns again. The same people who decided they really needed to warn the world about garage borne designer pandemics (by totally misunderstanding what DNA actually is and does).
Indeed, looking at the sponsors, it's not at all surprising to see that Open Philanthropy is behind it... both directly and indirectly. Moreover, they're trying to hide that fact by burying the reference deep in the supplementary materials behind others AND hiding the fact that their people are in charge of the other involved 'non-profit' organizations. 70+ Scientists don't come together on something like this without a lot of help. We should have better transparency standards for large science publications like this. Seems that neither "Open Phil" nor "Open AI" are being very Open about anything these days. Pitty.
What’s more realistic in the near-term is that conventional gain-of-function research creates a terrible, conventional bacterium that’s more deadly than Ebola and resistant to all of the antibiotics that we mass produce.
If there was an advantage to being opposite-handed, some bacterium would have done it by now. The article even says that researchers just found out that e-coli can consume different-handed food.
I’m guessing that the first discovery in this area, the ambi-vory of e-coli, is not really all that unique. Medical and biological science is still just scratching the surface. They’re still cataloguing new components of human anatomy, things you could have found with a microscope centuries ago… It is highly unlikely that out of the universe of billions of years of bacteria, e-coli is the singular organism that went down this route to the furthest extent that was advantageous. The fact that they found one example with their limited resources tells me that this is not so improbable.
The fear-mongering just sounds like a funding push to me. The basic research will be enriching for humanity, if it doesn’t create the very thing from which it purports to save us, though I’m thinking this messaging is a bit out there. Could you engineer a super-bioweapon this way? Probably. But there are easier ways to do that with information that’s already in the textbooks.
Basic biochemistry question (you can tell what I didn't study in uni)
Is it possible to mix chirality in, say, a protein?
I.e. have a portion of one chirality and another of the other?
Yes. Some bacteria have D-amino acids (such as D-alanine) as part of their cell walls (which otherwise contain almost entirely L-amino acids). D-amino acids are also sometimes incorporated into drugs that are synthetic peptide mimics in order to slow metabolism.
> D-amino acids are also sometimes incorporated into drugs that are synthetic peptide mimics in order to slow metabolism.
Thanks! I think that was the notecard in a dusty corner of my mind that was nagging.
d-ala is not incorporated into the protein main sequence (it's part of a D-ala D-lac sugar)
You can make these things in a lab. However Phind said "In summary, while scientists have proposed various models for how biological homochirality may have emerged, there is currently no known example of mixed protein chirality occurring in nature. Biological molecules appear to exhibit almost exclusive homochirality at the molecular level."
It makes sense, I guess. Why would something natural want to interact with both chiralities of a target? Usually there's a reason for one... and the other is unrelated.
it is possible to have mixed chirality in syntheic proteins. (see michael weiss work investigating insulin receptor binding to insulin)
its basically impossible (but not totally impossible) for a living creature to be able to generate any protein with mixed chiralities.
this is because a ribosome with a chamber that can support both chiralities is likely to be less efficient at protein extension. but also you need so much more trna if you want to support arbitrary d-amino acids, etc.
Yes, that can be created in principle, but you would need to modify the natural machinery (ribosome and tRNA) to make it possible.
Not sure what you mean by "in a protein", but if you have a solution of some chiral chemical compound such that there's 50% of the L-enantiomer and 50% of the R-enantiomer, you get what's called a "racemic" mixture. So, yes -- mixing chirality is possible in at least one sense.
So you are saying if by chance a normal bacteria was mutated into chiral/mirror we’d be wiped out? I’m sure there was such events in nature before
Not really possible via mutation. Mutation only impacts the genetic code, swapping chirality means swapping nearly every molecule in the organism all at once.
Doesn't sound very scary on the face of it. Apparently [0] the problem with Thalidomide was that the chirality could spontaneously reverse, so that sort of thing must happen frequently in nature. If bacteria haven't figured out how to use mirroring under evolutionary pressure it probably doesn't actually have any advantages over following the herd.
> that sort of thing must happen frequently in nature
Individual chiral molecules can happen naturally, sure, but not entire organisms. From the report: In a mirror bacterium, all of the chiral molecules of existing bacteria—proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites—are replaced by their mirror images.
In the fitness landscape there is an absolutely enormous gulf between standard and mirror bacteria, large enough that no amount of incremental evolutionary pressure could flip the ~billion chiral bonds in a given bacterium simultaneously.
Nature has built a lot of bacteria over the millennia. It probably has experimented with just building the whole thing backwards.
That sounds simpler to do than, say, evolving a cogwheel (which does happen occasionally) or actually developing some of these molecules in the first place. It'd be weird for evolution to struggle so much on trying such a simple concept somewhere. This is a process that naturally figured out solar power, a bunch of mechanical engineering properties, various chemical techniques, all sort of fluid dynamics and statics, radiation resistance, sensing and control systems, etc, etc. If it doesn't build things backwards, more likely than not it is because it doesn't work well. The process knows how to do quite complex engineering tasks.
> It'd be weird for evolution to struggle so much on trying such a simple concept somewhere.
While "building it backwards" sounds simple to us, it's not simple at all in evolutionary space. Evolution operates over a fitness landscape, where every configuration of an organism has some fitness (essentially, probability of reproducing). It can make good progress as long as there are paths that don't require traversing areas of impractically low fitness. The problem in this case is that between "normal" and "mirror" is an area of absurdly low fitness, which evolution shouldn't be expected to be able to cross.
We can't really say what is hard, because evolution tends to be more creative than anyone expects. But we can say it sounds easy - evolution would only need to come up with a "build this with reverse the chirality" mechanism and run everything through it. That'd even be what humans are doing in this research, I suspect. If there are advantages to reversing chirality then there'd be lots of paths where partially reversing chirality of parts of an organism would be interesting or creating clouds of reverse-chirality molecules would be evolutionary powerful.
It wouldn't be likely, but we're talking millions of years and a process that has overcome some remarkable engineering challenges. Finding one place where building backwards then extending that just wouldn't be such a big deal.
I think the ostensibly scary subject here is mirror DNA or RNA, not anything-that-doesn't-self-replicate.
> If bacteria haven't figured out how to use mirroring
It's unclear bacteria have ever "attempted" it. The synthesis of DNA is incredibly intricate and complex, and the set of proteins that do it are believed only to have ever evolved once. In order for a bacteria to have "attempted" this, it would have to evolve an entirely new set of proteins from scratch.
Personally I think a self-replicating photosynthetic cell with mirror DNA is as scary as self-replicating photosynthetic plastic.
>It's unclear bacteria have ever "attempted" it.
They have: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24647559/
> self-replicating photosynthetic plastic
Cellulose? It did cause quite the stir, I'll grant you.
What's scary about mirrored DNA? DNA is information store proteins are actuators.
> would have to evolve an entirely new set of proteins from scratch.
Mirrored amino acids already exist in some organisms.
> What's scary about mirrored DNA
Exponential growth of a self-replicating cell with zero predators.
> Mirrored amino acids already exist in some organisms.
You can have an entire planet full of mirror amino acids if you want; that's not the hard part. The hard part is evolving the entire set of mirror transcription proteins.
Where are you getting exponential growth without predators? That simply does not follow logically from any assumptions.
There are all kinds of examples of where the isomers of common compounds are bad for you, i.e. https://www.sciencealert.com/some-drugs-have-mirror-image-ch...
My go-to with any 'thing x could wipe out everything or is better than everything' is exactly this. If nature hasn't found it then I don't worry as much. That doesn't mean this shouldn't be considered and studied carefully, but this sounds like a bit more fear than it likely deserves.
Now we have another candidate to explain the Fermi paradox. Mirror Biology Armageddon. Even if life outside runs on alternative biochemistry, the odds are that some of its building blocks are chiral too, and subjected to the same risks in case the indigenous intelligent lifeform advances to the point of making mirror life.
Gain Of Function research is far more pressing, non-hypothetical, issue which may have already caused a major pandemia.
The potential for unchecked "growth" and potentially fatal infection vaguely reminds me of the terrifying aspects of prion based diseases. Thanks for giving me another theoretical nightmare scenario to worry about in the back of my mind! :-)
Related:
Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks (stanford.edu)
Prions are real. Don't eat mad cow. Rememeber that boiling prions would not kill them, but burning them to ashes will.
Mirrored bacterias are still just scifi. It's too hard to make one of them for now and some normal bacterias will eat them anyway becuase there are a lot of weird bacterias that can eat some specific varity of crap. One of them will save us [1].
The normal bacterias can have trouble eating the reversed proteins, RNA, DNA and even sugars. But oil/fat don't have this problem! In the worst case, normal bacterias will just steal all the oil and fat from the reversed bacterais and kill them, and we will have to sweep the discarded reversed proteins and burn them.
Grey goo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
AI paperclips
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem
Prions getting into food supply
Nuclear holocaust.
I’m definitely not sleeping tonight. I can see why Gen Z is thinking not to have kids…
I find it slightly heartening to consider that all biological life is already a long-running Gray Goo apocalypse, and one of the inheritors of that legacy are towering trillion-unit megastructures with eldritch hiveminds were call "people."
Environmental collapse due to climate change is way, way more likely than any of those.
And a full environmental collapse is not even strictly necessary to end civilization. If the climate perturbation is large enough it will cause a mass migration and an economic disaster, either of which is enough to cause a war.
Can humanity peacefully deal with things like half of China becoming uninhabitable by humans? Dunno but if I had to pit humanity against this or the mirror bacteria I'd choose the latter.
And Nuclear incidents caused by climate/ai extremists are way more likely than those.
Environmental collapse is a convenient, very portable goalpost though.
Lol, no activist is going to cause a nuclear event. It's just easier to accept that than the fact that we're ruining the biosphere.
This is so impressive that it's achievable, I maybe morbidly was imagining if we were to be wiped out due to this and another species were able to evolve to study how we died, would they come across these mirror Bacteria and believe they were natural. It all has very "Death Stranding" tones but I'm not a biologist by any means.
sounds like another NIH grant is going to be given to a shell nonprofit to move the research to a "BSL4" (honest, we don't reuse paper towels) lab somewhere in China.
Sounds like the warnings about GMO.
In the mean time, they tried using mRNA vaccines that did mimic our own mRNA, but they caused immune reaction. Substituting a different nucleoside and made the vaccine more stable. The way pseudouridine is used in mRNA vaccines isn't found in nature, ergo people who have been vaccinated are already carrying around bit bit of a form of life never seen before on the planet.
tRNA has a lot of weird nucleotices. I expect no problem with another one, but I'm not a biologist.
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA
> A large number of the individual nucleotides in a tRNA molecule may be chemically modified, often by methylation or deamidation. These unusual bases sometimes affect the tRNA's interaction with ribosomes and sometimes occur in the anticodon to alter base-pairing properties.
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