No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all
For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be, the lab-created microbes would be structured and organized like ordinary bacteria, with one important exception: Key biological molecules like proteins, sugars, and lipids would be the mirror images of those found in nature. DNA, RNA, and many other components of living cells are chiral, which means they have a built-in rotational structure. Their mirrors would twist in the opposite direction.
Researchers thrilled at the prospect. “Everybody—everybody—thought this was cool,” says John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, who attended the 2019 workshop and is a pioneer in developing synthetic cells. It was “an incredibly difficult project that would tell us potentially new things about how to design and build cells, or about the origin of life on Earth.” The group saw enormous potential for medicine, too. Mirror microbes might be engineered as biological factories, producing mirror molecules that could form the basis for new kinds of drugs. In theory, such therapeutics could perform the same functions as their natural counterparts, but without triggering unwelcome immune responses.
After the meeting, the biologists recommended NSF funding for a handful of research groups to develop tools and carry out preliminary experiments, the beginnings of a path through the looking glass. The excitement was global. The National Natural Science Foundation of China funded major projects in mirror biology, as did the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space.
By five years later, in 2024, many researchers involved in that NSF meeting had reversed course. They’d become convinced that in the worst of all possible futures, mirror organisms could trigger a catastrophic event threatening every form of life on Earth; they’d proliferate without predators and evade the immune defenses of people, plants, and animals.
Read more at Technology Review.