We are all bombarded with sensational headlines about some disaster on the horizon. So I don’t blame anyone who got tired when they saw that dozens last month Scientists warned in the journal science that Mirror bacteria can bring about a Catastrophic ecosystem collapse and even mass extinctions.
After all, we already have dire threats like H5N1 to worry about, and more generally we live in an age that, as Adam Kirsch Put it in the Atlantic recently, It seems “apocalypse, continuous.” The Mirror bacteria news hit the same week we said we read a lot Study It was really the result of how our black spatulas were killing us A math error. It’s hard to tell which concerns are serious and which are just headlines that will be forgotten after a month.
But after reading a lot about the mirror bacteria situation, I’m here with the bad news: it’s real, and it’s really serious.
More than 35 scientists, including leading researchers from half a dozen different fields, came together December Technical Report Arguing that ongoing work on mirror bacteria could trigger a mass extinction. The disaster it warns of is plausible, if mind-bending.
And this is not one of those situations where skeptics are coming from outside the field: many of the leading scientists who worked to invent mirror life are now convinced that such work would be incredibly dangerous. Indeed it is a rare case where experts have become more concerned because they have learned less, rather than less.
But there’s also good news: now that we’re aware of the risks, disasters won’t happen by accident. At this point, mirror life is mostly theoretical – it will take decades of work to make it a reality. So as scientists come to look more closely at the risks, they can put this work off at a much lower cost to other necessary research.
And with scientists from many disciplines voicing their concerns, there’s a good chance that we, as a world, can agree to do the right thing and not go there. Which is ideally how we should manage the risks of our new existence.
Mirror life, explained
Think of the letter R and its mirror image, the letter Я. No matter how much you rotate the letter R on a two-dimensional surface, you will never find Я. If you make a protein that links to an R, a Я won’t fit, and a molecule will turn out differently if it uses an R or Я as a backbone.
This story first appeared in the Future Perfect Newsletter.
Sign up here to explore the big, complex problems facing the world and the most effective ways to solve them Sent twice a week.
This is the basic idea behind mirror life, albeit in three dimensions instead of two. The amino acids that make up the proteins that make up all life on Earth can be made from atoms in two different mirrored ways, colloquially “left”- and “right”-handed. But when molecules exist in both forms, all life on Earth makes proteins from only left-handed amino acids (and other organic molecules, like DNA, also carry a “handedness” — that’s why DNA’s spiral helix always goes in one direction.)
This poses a tantalizing scientific puzzle: Couldn’t you in principle create “mirror life”—life made of right-handed amino acids? It will be a huge engineering project, involving work that we don’t yet know how to do.
But in principle, it should be possible. We’ve already made mirror proteins, and mirror enzymes can do that Read Mirror Gene.
What could go wrong?
The question is what happens after you succeed in building a mirror life.
At first it was thought that mirror bacteria would be effectively harmless, because they could not digest the “simple-hand” molecules that make up all existing life. Of course, they can eat normal nutrients, which do not have “hand” properties. But will it be enough for their multiplication and spread?
Many scientists initially assumed that it would not, meaning that mirror life would be safely self-limiting, unable to spread much because it would be unable to digest the rest of life, humans included.
But as they studied the possibility further, experts became concerned that this was not true. “In contrast to previous discussions of mirror life, we also realized that generalist heterotrophic mirror bacteria can find a range of nutrients in the animal host and environment and thus will not be internally bioconstrained,” science Report found.
So the mirror bacteria will be able to find enough to eat after all. Worse, existing life will struggle to feed their This means that creating mirror bacteria could be like introducing an invasive species into an ecosystem (in this case, the entire planet) where it has no predators.
Unless something has evolved to eat it or resist it initially, it can probably spread quickly. Invasive species can be very difficult to eradicate, even if they do not reach large populations. Mirror bacteria can be like this: a new species of globally distributed environmental bacteria, along with many existing ones.
But how disastrous will the introduction of this new invasive species be? Humans (and other animals and plants) are exposed to environmental bacteria all the time, and this is usually not a problem unless, for example, you have Damaged immune system.
So a team of immunologists worked on the question of whether our immune system would respond appropriately to invasion by mirror bacteria. Worryingly, they concluded that it probably wouldn’t.
While some of our immune defenses work without a specific target for a particular pathogen, many of them work only by trapping invading pathogens—something we wouldn’t be able to do for mirror bacteria. And scientists just haven’t found that it can make people sick. For exactly the same reason, it can all other Sickness — Every animal, even plants, can be vulnerable (although there will be considerable variation in exactly how susceptible a species is).
Results, as reported in December sciencecan be terrifying.
“We cannot rule out a scenario where a mirror bacterium acts as an invasive species across many ecosystems, causing widespread lethal infections in a significant proportion of plant and animal species, including humans.” A reasonable outcome, the authors found, is “unprecedented and irreversible damage.”
“It’s hard to overstate how serious these risks can be,” immunologist Ruslan MedzhitovOne of the co-authors of the technical report, warned in a statement sent to me. “Living in an area contaminated with yeast bacteria can be similar to living with severe immunodeficiency: any exposure to contaminated dust or soil can be fatal.”
“We’re not going to do it.”
To be clear, there were plenty of good reasons to consider creating a mirror life. “It’s inherently incredibly cool,” Kate AdammalaA synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota, Mirror told The New York Times about the effort to create the bacteria. “If we made a mirror cell, we would make a second tree of life.”
In fact Adamla and three other scientific colleagues are recipients of the 2019 grant including They explained that they “Try to design, construct and safely deploy synthetic mirror cells.” But they’re looking at it more, through collaboration 299-page Technical reportHe and his colleagues were convinced that it was not worth it: all four now joined the call science To stop working. “We’re saying, ‘We’re not going to do it,'” Admala said told the Times.
The US government, which funded Adamala and her colleagues’ work to create Mirror Life, is also adapting in response to these warnings.
“We applaud the efforts of these scientists to identify and assess the potential future risks of these types of artificial organisms, … advances in the life sciences and related technologies now empower scientists in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago,” a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told me.
“These advances have significant potential for benefit and, as these scientists have made clear, also potential for significant harm. Given the potential risks, we will work with and across the global research community to avoid and minimize risks while protecting the potential benefits of research in other applications of synthetic biology. The U.S. The government is beginning a deliberate process to review scientific assessments on the effects of mirror life and, as appropriate, develop or revise relevant federal biosecurity policies.”
For that reason, I think it can be read not as a doom-and-gloom title to start your year, but as a hopeful story. A large number of talented people across various relevant disciplines came together and tried to figure out if there was a problem. They realized that was there and changed their course.
Of course it is too early to declare victory. But if it’s a story of a looming challenge, it’s also a story of people rising to it—before disaster strikes.
Happy New Year!
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect Newsletter. Sign up here!
