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Mirror bacteria research poses significant risks, scientists warn
- xolox 2y agoThe 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) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403394
- nytesky 2y agoGrey goo. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo AI paperclips https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-and-paperclip-problem 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…
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoEnvironmental collapse due to climate change is way, way more likely than any of those.
- Jerrrry 2y agoAnd Nuclear incidents caused by climate/ai extremists are way more likely than those. Environmental collapse is a convenient, very portable goalpost though.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoLol, 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.
- praptak 2y agoAnd 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.
- Terr_ 2y agoI 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."
- gus_massa 2y agoPrions 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds
- philipkglass 2y agoThe full report is here: "Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks" https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036 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 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 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 https://denovo.substack.com/p/green-goo-republished And a commenter there mentioned Rifters also.
- selimthegrim 2y agoI did mention it I think on one of the other discussions on HN that got merged here
- mattclarkdotnet 2y agoPeter Watts’ work is indeed bleak, harsh, but brilliant. I thought Blindsight was a hard read but the Rifters trilogy is another level
- megiddo 2y agoMade me stop reading for awhile.
- Symmetry 2y agoIf 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
- joshuaissac 2y agoWhy 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 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.
- scotty79 2y agoMirror bacteria evolving the ability to eat normal sugar would be the killer.
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoMicroscopic organisms mutate rapidly and unpredictably, so this sounds like a "swallow a spider to catch the fly" situation.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> 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."
- joshuaissac 2y agoThe 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.
- roywiggins 2y agoThe 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.
- Qem 2y agoNow 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.
- 00N8 2y agoIf 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.
- rstuart4133 2y agoSounds 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.
- gus_massa 2y agotRNA 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 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.
- harimau777 2y agoHow 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.
- throwuxiytayq 2y agoWe don’t research what happens when a child falls out of a plane and nobody feels like we’re falling behind for it.
- exe34 2y agobut would a ban really stop somebody from trying?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoIf 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.
- exe34 2y agoThat is to say, our enemies will master it first and we will be caught with our pants down.
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoWe'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.
- divbzero 2y ago> 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.)
- dekhn 2y agoAntibodies 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.
- andrewflnr 2y ago> 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.
- baranul 2y agoUnfortunately, 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.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoThus we can conclude military will make them. And they will escape.
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- aitchnyu 2y agoSo 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.
- lawlessone 2y agoI 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.
- mr_toad 2y agoI 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?
- Filligree 2y agoI’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.
- tw04 2y agoDo 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.
- sitkack 2y agoHumanity 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 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.
- cj 2y ago
- conqueso 2y agoSearching 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?
- Qem 2y agoMirror 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.
- GenerocUsername 2y agoIt 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.
- ethbr1 2y agoMore 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality#Biology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality#Biology
- phkahler 2y ago>> 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.
- Qem 2y agoDiscussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886
- dang 2y agoA 'Second Tree of Life' Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42403886 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.
- yawpitch 2y agoDid Star Trek not already warn us about this one?
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoThere'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".
- yawpitch 2y agoDon’t forget its thrilling sequel, “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus, Again”.
- amyjess 2y agoThere was a fairly recent issue of the Fantastic Four about this as well. (where "fairly recent" means part of Ryan North's excellent run)
- ben_w 2y agoNot 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.
- selimthegrim 2y agoIf this was ‘Starfish’ it was longer than a short story
- ben_w 2y agoI 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.
- scotty79 2y agoHow much achiral food would be available for these bacteria anyways in nature? They'd have to compete for it with all other life.
- mallomarmeasle 2y agoBesides 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.
- nkrisc 2y agoYou 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.
- aeternum 2y agoSeems 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.
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- roywiggins 2y agoThe 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.
- ethbr1 2y agoBasic 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?
- _yb2s 2y agoYes, that can be created in principle, but you would need to modify the natural machinery (ribosome and tRNA) to make it possible.
- mallomarmeasle 2y agoYes. 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.
- ethbr1 2y ago> 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.
- throwawaymaths 2y agod-ala is not incorporated into the protein main sequence (it's part of a D-ala D-lac sugar)
- frabert 2y agoNot 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.
- throwawaymaths 2y agoit 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.
- odyssey7 2y agoWhat’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.
- m3kw9 2y agoSo 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
- luma 2y agoNot really possible via mutation. Mutation only impacts the genetic code, swapping chirality means swapping nearly every molecule in the organism all at once.
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- gwbas1c 2y agoSome 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.)
- pavel_lishin 2y agoBut 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.
- oniony 2y agoConversely, Great Filter.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoNo, they calculated the likelihood of this as being acceptably low. Are you criticising that they checked?
- ninininino 2y agoI 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?
- gwbas1c 2y ago> 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.
- ceejayoz 2y agoMany 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.
- skygazer 2y agoHow about we make mirror prions that affect/infect mirror bacteria, but are inert to us? It becomes a targeted therapy.
- ceejayoz 2y ago"Let's make synthetic prion diseases!" sounds like a phrase that'd make a biologist shudder.
- the__alchemist 2y agoThis 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.
- treyd 2y agohttps://archive.is/5MhOW https://archive.is/5MhOW 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?
- cyberax 2y agoSugars 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.
- Animats 2y ago> 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. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015068724A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2015068724A1/en [2] https://drugs.ncats.io/drug/02833ISA66 https://drugs.ncats.io/drug/02833ISA66
- pixl97 2y agoAh the Haribo sugar free gummi bear effect.
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- dmitrygr 2y agoA short story/cautionary tale on this very subject: https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world
- roenxi 2y agoDoesn'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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality#In_biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality#In_biology
- kstrauser 2y agoThere 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-chemical-structures-and-the-wrong-one-can-be-harmful https://www.sciencealert.com/some-drugs-have-mirror-image-ch...
- jmward01 2y agoMy 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.
- notfed 2y agoI 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.
- aydyn 2y agoWhat'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.
- ltbarcly3 2y agoThere 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.
- fastaguy88 2y agoThe 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.
- kstrauser 2y agoAre 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.
- fastaguy88 2y agoEarly 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.
- nextos 2y agoThe 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.
- pazimzadeh 2y agoMost 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.
- aydyn 2y agoI 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.
- notfed 2y agoAgreed 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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
- efitz 2y agoMaybe 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.
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- throwup238 2y agoHow 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.
- throw310822 2y ago> 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.
- throwup238 2y agoYeah 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.
- XorNot 2y agoThis 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).
- DocSmith 2y agoIndeed, 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.
- geysersam 2y agoIf 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?
- nmstoker 2y agoLife 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.
- geysersam 2y agoThat 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.
- nmstoker 2y agoThe 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.
- bilekas 2y agoThis 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.
- shaky-carrousel 2y agoThat'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.
- danwills 2y agoI 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?
- cogman10 2y agoI 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.
- Aerroon 2y agoI 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/ 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.
- trhway 2y agosounds 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.
- d--b 2y agoAlso: 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.
- Borrible 2y agoTime flies (2010): https://www.wired.com/story/building-a-parallel-universe/ https://www.wired.com/story/building-a-parallel-universe/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997472
- IWeldMelons 2y agoGain Of Function research is far more pressing, non-hypothetical, issue which may have already caused a major pandemia.
- aaroninsf 2y agoNo 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