A group of roughly 40 scientists, including several who pioneered synthetic biology, published a joint warning that building organisms from the opposite-handed, mirror-image version of life's molecules could be catastrophic rather than merely novel.
No mirror bacteria exist yet, but the biological tools to attempt building one are advancing quickly, and the group argued the risk should be assessed before anyone tries, not after. Mirror bacteria could evade many of the immune defenses and natural predators that have evolved to recognize only the usual chirality, since the matching cues are stereochemically specific.
A mirror bacterium loose in the environment might face no natural predators, parasites, or immune defenses anywhere, since billions of years of evolution never had to prepare for a molecule built the other way around. The commentary recommends that work aimed at creating mirror bacteria not be permitted or funded unless strong evidence shows it is safe, while research on mirror molecules continues. The debate it opened is still unfolding.
Read the original study
Adamala et al., Science, 2024 · doi.org/10.1126/science.ads9158
A warning issued before the danger exists.
Source
- Adamala, K. P., Agashe, D., Belkaid, Y., Bittencourt, D. M. d. C., Cai, Y., Chang, M. W., Chen, I. A., Church, G. M., Cooper, V. S., Davis, M. M., Devaraj, N. K., Endy, D., Esvelt, K. M., Glass, J. I., Hand, T. W., Inglesby, T. V., Isaacs, F. J., James, W. G., Jones, J. D. G., . . . Zuber, M. T. (2024). Confronting risks of mirror life. Science, 386(6728), 1351–1353. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads9158