‘Mirror Bacteria’ Poses Existential Threat to Humanity, Warn Experts

United States: Prominent experts have sounded a very alarming note on the dangers of the ‘unprecedented’ synthetic, lab-made life, especially given that it can lead to the extinction of man as a race.

More about the news

Also known as ‘mirror life,’ synthetic organisms are built from mirrored forms of the molecules existing in the natural world.

Scientists fear that such mirror organisms are ‘invisible’ to life on the planet, thus enabling them to penetrate the immune systems of all organisms.

This means that in the event that mirror bacteria were to escape the lab, the bacteria would have the ability to spread in the wild and pose a dangerous health risk to plants, animals, and man by infecting them with lethal infections.

The creation of mirror bacteria is at least a decade away, but as the authors of an impressive 300-page technical review in Science state, the pace of advancement is accelerating.

What more has the expert stated?

Thirty-eight experts, a group of Nobel laureates, including some of the former experimenters who attempted to create mirror life, are now urging scientists to stop developing the idea.

According to Dr Vaughn Cooper, a microbiologist from the University of Pittsburgh and co-author of the paper, “This form of life has never existed or evolved, consequently, all biological interactions would be different or likely wouldn’t work,” as Daily Mail reported.

“We don’t want to limit that promise of synthetic biology, but building a mirror bacterium is not worth the risk,” Cooper added.

More Explanation

As experts explain, it’s just like one’s left hand is the mirror image of their right; many biochemical molecules also have a ‘left-handed’ and ‘right-handed’ mirror image.

But what makes this feature so valuable for biology is the fact that it does not depend on the species: the molecules that comprise all living beings on Earth have the same handedness.

For instance, while the double helix is a right-handed structure, proteins are synthesized using left-handed amino acids.

Still, as far as scientists can determine, it’s just a weird quirk of evolution that our DNA is right-handed, and there is no good reason that life could not have evolved from mirrored components.

Thus, even though mirror life cannot originate from life in its usual form, it is still possible to synthesize an organism using only mirror molecules, according to scientists.

According to Gregory Winter, the co-author Professor and a Nobel prize-winning biologist from the University of Cambridge, “The risk of mirror life, in particular mirror bacteria, is that living organisms would not recognize their mirror counterparts as ‘foreign’ and would not have the natural defenses to protect themselves from attack by them,” Daily Mail reported.

“For example, humans would struggle to make antibodies against the mirror bacteria and be unable to control an infection. Similar arguments apply to all other living organisms, including plants under attack by mirror bacteria,” Winter added.